Seven books about a prophecy that changes everything

Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Writer's Digest, Portland Monthly Magazine, and elsewhere.

She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing.

Bankole's debut novel, The Edge of Water, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, is the story of Amina, a young woman, who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "works of fiction in which a life-altering prophecy is featured." One title on the list:

The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen

Set in nineteenth-century Sweden, this lush historical novel–about the destructive consequences of settlers’ encroachment on the indigenous Sámi people of the Sápmi region–begins with prophetic dreaming. Reminiscent of a central theme in The Edge of Water, the book opens with the night-before dream of one of its characters, Lars Levi–a Lutheran minister. Attributing it to his family line, his standing as a vessel of God, and his home in the gray Scandinavian tundra, he believes in the power of dreams to foretell. On the morning that prominent reindeer herder and Sámi leader, Biettar Rasti, unexpectedly walks into church during Sunday service and kneels at the altar shaking, Lars Levi recalls an unsettling but forgotten dream from the previous night–perhaps it had been a portent for stubborn Biettar’s unlikely religious awakening. From this very incident–Biettar’s conversion–the families of the two men become inextricably joined in ways that have transformative, damaging consequences for all.

Read about another book on Bankole's list.

--Marshal Zeringue