The Believers: Stories

A. K. Herman

Dec 2024 · A. R. Phillips Press LLC

About this ebook

A. K. Herman’s wondrous and shattering debut collection imbues people on the periphery with power hardly visible to outsiders—where no one conforms to type. In the title story, to leave a seemingly friendly and supportive church, a family must risk everything. In “The Iridescent Blue-Black Boy with Wings (After Márquez),” children find a winged boy in a seaside village in Tobago. In “Ready for the Revolution?” uncertain lovers play rough with identity politics, and are set on an unexpected path. 

In “Drink the Dew,” love and wrath become one, while the young woman in “Inside” navigates a complicated business arrangement with her lover. In “Love,” a scandalous affair produces a love child, born with a dark omen, while in “Exile,” a pregnant teen from a staunchly religious family is exiled to have her baby in secret. A gardener in “Love Story No. 8” falls for a rich man’s daughter to disastrous ends. The Believers is at once poignant and subversive, haunting and truly unforgettable.

About the author

A. K. Herman is a Caribbean poet and fiction writer, born in Scarborough, Tobago. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in various print and online literary journals, including Doek! Literary Journal, Lolwe, The Waterstone Review, Shenandoah and others. A. K. lives in New York.