We are proud to present the cover of our new book, A Killing in the Sun. This book was first published in 2014, to great critical acclaim, and some scholars think it is a landmark publication for it was the first single-author collection of speculative stories from Africa, at least by an author who lives and works on the continent. At that time it was published by Black Letter Media, a South African publishing house, which has since folded and the book has been out of print. We are now reviving it. We plan to bring out a new and revised edition, along with an audio book narrated by the author, and this will be before 1st September 2026.

The cover was made by the author, Dilman Dila, who is also a filmmaker and a digital artist, among many other things, and so he decided to use these skills to make the artwork. Though, it will be credited under his pseudonym, Jo Ojok. He designed it in Blender 3D software, where he modeled the creature and the vehicle from which it emerges, and did post-processing and creating the final art piece in Krita, where he combined it with the background. The final design for the cover was made in Inkscape. All these are free and opensource software.

For inspiration on the artwork, he looked at the third story in the collection, Itanda Bridge, which is about a diver who is sent to investigate a strange occurrence in a river. This image is not an accurate description of  what the diver will find at the bottom of the river, but it is a mild spoiler as it draws heavy inspiration from a scene in that story. The idea of the creature came from slapping a human face on an octopus, or some kind of sea creature with tentacles, two of which are human-like hands.

The back of the print version of the cover contains several blurbs, which readers left in various social media and blogs over the years. We post them here to aid with screen readers, and have left links to some reviews that are available online.

Front Cover blurbs:
“Well worth reading” Strange Horizons.

“So loving these sci-fi short stories, each one is memorable.” Zukiswa Wanner.

Back Cover Blurbs:
“…perfectly poised between the robustness of genre and the more literary concern” Mark Bould, LA Review of Books

“From the first page of the first story, I felt the surge of anticipation of the possibility of something really special…” Binyavanga Wainaina

“Enjoyable… Dila has good material and can clearly write brilliant speculative fiction.” Tade Thompson

“Straight up loved it… Dilman’s writing style flows off the page and I lost myself in each and every story. Seriously, I can’t praise this collection of stories enough.” Muuka, Another Drop of Ink

“This short story collection by Ugandan writer, Dilman Dila, is sheer entertainment with a thick seem of seriousness…. The beauty of these stories is that each in their own way shows a human side, of people who love, hate, fear and yearn. Dila’s wonderful imagination lifts this collection into an alien yet familiar space, where the ‘other’ is lampooned in a fantastical way.” Penny de Vries, African Writing Book Reviews

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