Awards season is in full force and we’re excited to be caught in the tide of good news. We’re excited to see that ESPERANCE by Adam Oyebanji is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes!

The novel is a finalist in the Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction category. The winners will be awarded at the 46th annual L.A. Times Festival of Books in April (and the whole JAB team is rooting for Adam!).

Adam Oyebanji’s latest is a twisty sci-fi thriller perfect for fans of Blake Crouch and Andy Weir. Detective Ethan Krol’s investigation into a seemingly impossible crime—a sea-water drowning on the twentieth floor of a Chicago apartment hundreds of miles from the ocean—sets him on the trail of Abidemi Eniola, who can do remarkable things with technology. In a clash of cultures, and histories and different ideas about right and wrong, someone’s justice will have to give way, and the consequences will be deadly.

In addition to this nomination, ESPERANCE has received critical praise from outlets such as The Guardian and Locus Magazine upon its publication last spring. It was also selected as an Editors’ Choice for Booklist, Goodreads, and Amazon. In their starred review, one of three that the book received, BookPage wrote how “Lovers of sharp, fast sci-fi from the likes of Neal Stephenson will be right at home with Esperance. For this reader, it scratched about a dozen itches at once and then some. It’s exciting, inventive and murky, an ocean worth the plunge.”

Congratulations, Adam!