First and foremost, a gracious thanks to the Universe for bringing this novel together on its own time.
I’d like to thank my former Penguin editor Sharyn November for helping me strengthen the continuation of Sunny’s story. Thanks to my current editor Regina Hayes for jumping in and making this novel really shine. Thanks to my Nigerian editor Bibi Bakare-Yusuf for helping me smooth away so many of the Americanisms I couldn’t help putting in the novel. Thanks to producer Mark Ceryak and filmmaker Barry Jenkins for those days years ago working on that film treatment that ended up helping me generate some of the ideas in this novel. Thanks so so much to Success T for letting me weave the nonfiction of his own experiences with confraternities into this novel; that chapter was practically word-for-word. Thanks to illustrator Greg Ruth for the stunning rendition of Sunny Nwazue, as seen on the cover of Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi. And thank you to my mother, my father, my daughter Anyaugo, Ifeoma, Ngozi, Emezie, Dika, Obioma, Chinedu, and the rest of my family in Nigeria and scattered about the Diaspora, because family na family, o.
The masquerades dance and the ancestors smile,