Sky Full of Elephants

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

Praise for Sky Full of Elephants

"A bold and imaginative premise unfolds with lyrical language, hope and humor in Cebo Campbell's Sky Full of Elephants. Like the best speculative fiction, it compels us to view our own world through new eyes. This debut novel is not to be missed."  
TANANARIVE DUE, author of The Reformatory and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

"Replete with airline-less airports, sprawling mansions up for grabs, and an Alabaman monarchy, Sky Full of Elephants is a supremely imaginative exploration of family, loss, and the many roads to healing. Cebo Campbell gifts us a vivid odyssey full of possibility, proving that liberation doesn't reside in the rejection of history, but in our embrace of it. This is a debut that dares us to tap into frequencies of freedom, to view ourselves as what...