From The Library of Jurgen Leitner
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One Message Remains
February 2025
Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In "One Message Remains," Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
In "The Weight of What is Hollow," Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
Finally, in "Forsaking All Others," ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother's village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.
Cover illustration: John G. Reinhart
Cover design: Christine M. Scott
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Praise for One Message Remains
Nebula award winner Mohamed delivers more science-infused, dystopian speculative fiction in this hard-hitting collection of four interlinked stories.
An established master of short fiction, Mohamed brings her typical clarity and assurance to a new–but desperately familiar–world haunted by violence, empire, ghosts, and devils. These are simply some of the most human and humane stories I've ever read.
Premee Mohamed is one of speculative fiction's greatest authors, and this collection provided further proof.
Premee Mohamed is one of Canada's most exciting thinkers and writers of speculative fiction. Her stories bravely go where few dare to, each employing a deftness of language and surety of form that offers a fresh experience each time. One Message Remains and the stories within are no exception, each tale different from the other, yet all very much quintessential Premee stories. Readers of her works, long and short both, will find much to love here.
Premee Mohamed sends her readers once more unto the breach with her stunning stories and I for one am sure to follow wherever she leads the charge. The battlefield has never been more breathtaking, where the horrors of war go beyond the borders of our own world, explored with such probing, insightful prose.
Nobody writes like Premee Mohamed, with justice on one shoulder and compassion on the other, and a pen that dances over the page. In One Message Remains, she draws different voices and perspectives to the fore like a conductor of a small and beautifully crafted symphony, in a minor key.
Mohamed has given us an incisive collection that unflinchingly dissects the brutal clockwork mechanism behind colonialism and the very real, flesh and blood people who are caught within its cogs. Beautifully penned, insightful and honest in it's portrayal of resistance, this is exactly the brave kind of anticolonial work we need now more than ever.
Gallows creak, the perished whisper, and death herself watches from the audience. On stages, on the run, and in graves, people try to find ways of resisting the oppression that has controlled them for so long. A beautiful collection of stories with prose that sings until your very bones resonate with their melody.
Premee Mohamed's One Message Remains is a dark crystal. With prose that shimmers like gemstones, Mohamed presents us with several tales, each richly captivating, each lined with shadows, exquisite world building, and a touch of ever growing sadness, and of course death. This is Mohamed at her absolute best.
One Message Remains is a fierce, compact book with a dagger-sharp focus on empire and complicity. These are stories about how war is waged outside of the conventional battle scenes, set instead in the places where the imperial boot grinds down on the human face, in ideology, in bureaucracy, in standardization, and the violent excision of anything that doesn't fit.
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