THE UNWOVEN WARRIOR by Jon Keevy is a genre-blurring fantasy novel driven by character, with fast-paced action that barely lets up. The magic is eerie and edges into science fiction and mild body-horror. Its themes are of leadership, legacy, and the nature of self, woven through an African-inspired setting with a few extra zeppelins and sentient plants thrown in.
“THE UNWOVEN WARRIOR is precisely what we’re looking for,” says Mirari CEO Marius du Plessis. “It asks us difficult questions while keeping us breathless to the last page. The afro-fantasy world Jon has created defies antiquated tropes and introduces us to a host of characters that make us root for them even though the odds are so terribly against them. THE UNWOVEN WARRIOR blends genre fiction with the universal struggles of being a human in a world that never plays fair.”
Amkela was never meant to be a leader and he was certainly never meant to be his people's last hope. Strike hard and disappear into the Wilds, that's how he knows how to fight. And that's how the Last Defenders of the Ancestors have been led by his older brother Nenkani, Lion of the West and leader of the Inyentu people in their war against the occupying Karaphi Empire. But when a betrayal leaves his brother dead and the Last Defenders scattered, Amkela must step forward. He finds help in a strange plant-like being, Dreaming-What-Is-To-Come, an alien to their world that offers power at a steep price. He'll pay it to save his people, though he may lose himself.
Jon Keevy is an award-winning writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Which sounds like a standard start to a biography, but it gets a little odd when he includes the title of his most successful project: Genital Jousting. It's a computer game about a penis looking for a date and it was nominated for Narrative Excellence at the 2019 IGF Awards in San Francisco. After bringing that up the biography returns to normalcy with Jon's wide-ranging body of work in prose, theatre, children's books, online content and film. As is usual with biographies, he's used a list with many different genres to handwave you past the specifics of his career. And, as is also usual, he will conclude with a humanising personal fact: as a nine-year-old he wrote stories about meeting dinosaurs. His favorite is a pachycephalosaurus.
THE UNWOVEN WARRIOR is scheduled for publication late 2024, and will be available in print and digital format.