A bold, dark, horrifying collection of stories, full of visceral episodes that refuse t be bound by genre. My favourite was the titular story, an utterly brilliant and bloody take that recasts the consumerist hordes of the big sales as literal zombies and the staff, warriors determined to survive and to sell!

In the stories of Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, an amusement park lets players enter augmented reality to hunt terrorists or shoot intruders played by minority actors, a school shooting results in both the victim and gunman stuck in a shared purgatory, and an author sells his soul to a many-tongued god.

There were a few stories here which captured and kept my attention, but there were others which I was indifferent to, and even a few which I did not enjoy. I found Friday Black a very mixed collection, which had too many science-fiction/futuristic/fantastical elements for my personal taste. Still, Adjei-Brenyah is certainly an author whose career I will follow with interest.

The Finkelstein 5 - 5 stars; a short but deeply political story about a white man decapitating five black children and the furious aftermath following the verdict. The injustice that Adjei-Brenyah was able to convey will hit close to home for many black people.

Things My Mother Said - 2 stars; very short so unable to express much depth.

The Era - 3 stars; set in an alternative universe where babies can be genetically engineered to perfection. Set in a school full of children where something "went wrong" during the process. A really interesting take on what a "perfect" society means - is it all that it sets itself up to be? Hard to keep up with at times.

Lark Street - 1 stars; gruesome and very disturbing. Aborted foetuses come back to life.

The Hospital Where - 2 stars; not really sure how to describe this story as it was a bit all over the place. A very interesting concept though.

Zimmer Land - 5 stars; this is my favourite story of the bunch. Set in a theme park where people can pay to be put in "threatening situations", which basically means being able to pay to shoot ethnic minorities again and again and again without consequence. An important nod to Trayvon Martin.

Friday Black - 3 stars; a story about the consumerist hell that is Black Friday. Terrifying but also unsurprising, which was surprising in itself.

The Lion & the Spider - 2 stars; a story with a moral at the end, but I felt like it was too short for me to really connect with the characters.

Light Spitter - 3 stars; about a school shooting and the afterlife aftermath. Interesting as you see the brief perspectives of the victims and the shooters/potential shooters.

How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing - 1 star; a follow-up from Friday Black, but very short and I struggled to see the story behind it.

In retail - 1 star; I finished this book this morning and I can’t actually remember what this short story is about. Definitely eclipsed by the final story.

Through the Flash - 4 stars; a story about the end of the world, where everyone alive gets stuck in a loop reliving the very last day. You become wiser and develop “superpowers” (super intelligence, super strength, etc.) but externally remain the same. An interesting exploration of what it means to be human and the depth of growth and change that any individual can go through.

If I base the overall rating on the average of the star ratings I’ve given to each individual story, Friday Black would end up with 2.7 stars. However, I don’t think that rating does the overall collection of stories justice. There are a few stories that I found bland and lacking in substance, but these are outranked by the stories that were pure genius. I finished The Finkelstein 5, Zimmer Land and Through the Flash and just wanted more (I'm really keen for Zimmer Land to become a novel in its own right. Please!) Friday Black is a collection that is disturbing yet profoundly powerful. Even if all the stories weren't to my taste, as a black woman living in 2019, I can't fail to see their significance. The star rating is for my enjoyment and not representative of the importance that this book holds.

I have never been a huge fan of the short story format but if there were ever a collection to change that opinion this is it. It's powerful stuff - intriguing, unsettling, thought provoking - and it addresses its themes in a manner that is hard-hitting and fearless. But it's also out-there weird and wildly imaginative without ever losing the direct hit of its message. In short, the writing is exceptional.

This is a really interesting book. Dystopia is never "feel good" and this at times was thoroughly terrifying. The writing is excellent and the short stories are thought provoking but can also be a bit depressing. I would definitely recommend but don't expect to feel good after. You will find yourself examining how you view the world and your personal bias.

WOW. Just wow. This book is a punch in the jaw, in the best possible way. After the first story I had to put the book aside just to breathe, as I think I forgot to in the last few paragraphs. So many of the stories -
‘Zimmer Land’, ‘The Lion & the Spider’, ‘Light Spitter’ felt like they popped the top of my head off and made everything else I was reading feel flimsy in comparison. It’s a slim book, but it packs so much punch.

I didn’t love all the stories - ‘The Era’, ‘Lark Street’ and ‘The Hospital Where’ felt a little muddy and unfocused after the white-hot rage of the other stories. But taken as a whole the collection is challenging, creative and confronting.

This was an incredible read and I can’t wait to see what Adjei-Brenyah writes next.

As a big fan of short stories, I was intrigued by the reviews of this debut collection by Adjei-Brenyah, so picked up a copy at my local bookstore ahead of a flight, only to realise I'd been approved to read it on Netgalley. I have to say it's a mixed bag, but when he's good he's AMAZING. I think my main issue was that the first story "The Finkelstein Five" was in my opinion by far the strongest one in here, and left me with all kinds of thoughts in my head.
I struggled to connect with the author who has sold his soul to a many-headed god, but then got drawn right back in again by the consumerism-gone-mad tales of work in retail (“Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by Ice King”).
All in all, this is worth buying just for the first story, which is a truly outstanding piece of writing. Recommended.

This is a really strange collection of short stories. Dystopian and fantastical in turn. Some characters and settings have a second airing - for instance there are two stories about the winter clothing shop. I only really enjoyed and understood 2 or 3 of them - the first Friday Black and the one called "Light Spitter" were my favourites. Others either made no sense or simply didn't appeal one example would be "Zimmer Land".

"Black Friday" is a collection of short stories that are sometimes weird, strange and occasionally absolutely bonkers, that concentrate around issues of race and racism, consumerism and culture, I confess that I did not "get" all the stories from this book, possibly due to cultural differences and lack of a point of reference ( I am not American, not even British, I am not black either) but those I GOT I thought were really really powerful. I hesitate to say I liked them, because you do not like the horrors described in some of them, but they will definitely stay with me for a very long time - Finkelstein 5, Zimmer Land, Light Spitter, Through the Flash and (utterly bizarre and bonkers) Friday Black were my favourities. Adjei-Brenyah doesn't need to reach far to shock the audience, he just writes about the world around us, but his twist on the stories told makes them fresh, original and angry. This is one of the best story collections I have read.

Race and capitalism in America should be fertile ground for literary fiction. This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy brought the usual bout of stabbings and shootings to add to the overall death count, not to mention the looming environmental collapse that such consumerism feeds. And the list of things you can’t do while black without having the police called or a gun pulled on you seems to expand by the day, from working out to moving into an apartment to buying Mentos.

Yet Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah startled me by the freshness, directness and urgency with which it dealt with these issues. In this debut collection of short stories, we meet zombie-like shoppers fighting over cut-price jackets, a theme park where visitors can experience the thrill of shooting a black intruder, a white homeowner who decapitates five black children with a chainsaw because he felt threatened.

If the setups sound extreme, that’s because they are. The realities of race and capitalism in America are extreme, so the satirist has to up his game to stay a step ahead. Yet the impressive achievement of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is to make them believable, to make sharp political points without coming over as didactic. That’s what the best political fiction does, and that’s what the stories in Friday Black deliver.

As the author told Vox in an interview:

“I turned up the volume because it’s interesting to think about how bad the violence has to be for us to care. I got to make more acute points about how readily we allow love to become conflated with things in the stores, things that are purchasable; how often we allow love to be externalized, turned into something we can buy back from whatever company. Exaggeration helps with that.”

I was hooked from the opening of the very first story, where we meet the main character, Emmanuel, consciously dialling his Blackness up and down on a 10-point scale as he tries to navigate life as a black man in America while being haunted by visions of a headless girl (one of the victims of the scared white man with the chainsaw) “waiting for him to do something, anything.”

Throughout the story, Emmanuel is pulled back and forth between bringing his Blackness down below 5 for his own safety and ratcheting it up towards 10 in solidarity with the Finkelstein Five and the movement inspired by their murder and the acquittal of their killer.

As his Blackness creeps up past 7.0, he remembers the advice of his father:

“‘You gotta know how to move,’ his father had said to him at a very young age. Emmanuel started learning the basics of his Blackness before he knew how to do long division: smiling when angry, whispering when he wanted to yell.”

There’s a palpable tension throughout the story between these learnt survival techniques and the anger he feels, the growing sense of obligation. How bad do things have to get before you do something, before you abandon the attempt to survive and try to change things, or at least to be more honest?

Characters face similar dilemmas in other stories. Zay needs a job, but is it worth playing the role of thug and getting beaten and shot multiple times a day by white patrons playing the role of indignant homeowner in a theme park? The retail workers in the stories dealing with mall life also have tough choices to make. They may not want to sell jackets to crazed sale shoppers, but they need work, and they just want to get through it without ending up like Lucy, the Taco Town cashier who jumped from the fourth floor on her lunch break.

Friday Black has received a lot of praise from the likes of George Saunders (“an excitement and a wonder”) and Roxane Gay (“dark and captivating and essential”), along with ecstatic write-ups in the major papers. Normally, when books get this much hype, the reality tends to disappoint me (c.f. The Flamethrowers, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). But this time, the book actually lived up to the hype. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long while, and if I were talking to you in person I’d press my copy into your hands and urge you to read it (which would be odd since it’s on my Kindle).

There are magical elements in some of the stories, sci-fi elements in others, and straight-up weirder-than-sci-fi reality in others. If you’re looking for something fresh and different and contemporary and beautifully written, do give it a try.

A dystopian, ‘Black Mirror’ style collection of short stories, Friday Black imagines a variety of very possible and terrifying futures particularly concerning black communities in the US.


Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut is a shocking, visceral exploration of society and how it affects young black Americans, from ideas of justice and law, to modern consumerism. The stories are clever takes on 21st Century life and current social issues.


‘The Finklestein 5’, ‘Zimmer Land’ and the three linked ‘Friday Black’ stories are particularly notable. The first story, ‘The Finklesein 5’ is stark illustration of what it is like to live as a black person in America. The trope of having a scale of ‘blackness’ is one I am sure many readers of colour will identify with, and though some elements of the story are clearly dystopian, it serves to illustrate how close we are to a similar moment in a way that the best books of this genre do. Equally ‘Zimmer Land’ feels like an episode from Black Mirror, and the premise is utterly believable. It is no surprise that Adjei-Brenyah was inspired by real life occurrences, as it feels very possible that people would look for such entertainment.


The three tales which focus on the ridiculousness of consumerism are high in satire, drawn from the authors own experiences of the industry. These tales force us to question our humanity and the values of modern society. The stories are a fine balance of black humour and horror, making them perfectly pitched as satires, but also close to the bone for those who have worked in retail or the service industry.


As a collection, the stories contribute to make a striking point about the state of the world we live in. Despite being a short collection, the stories pack in a lot and leave you wanting more from the warped versions of our world Adjei-Brenyah creates. Friday Black is an exciting collection which is certain to make an impact in the book world, and readers should not only be picking up this book, but keeping an eye out for what Adjei-Brenyah does next.

A compelling, imaginative and startlingly well-written collection of short stories. So linguistically-accomplished they took my breath away. These stories use the surreal world of shopping malls, zombies and virtual reality to question racism, consumer-culture and contemporary western life, in a completely fresh and innovative way. As Adjei-Brenyah says in a recent podcast from the New York Times, when asked about what makes him use fiction to tackle these political issues: "If the house is on fire I'm not going to write about what's in the fridge.".

This is writing of the highest order from a gifted author who is still in his twenties. I look forward to reading more from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

This is one of my, if not my absolute, favourite of the year.
The tales are wild and otherworldly as well as rousing and poignant. i'm not usually a fan of short stories but i inhaled these!
I've discovered an author where i know i'll read whatever they write next: i'm in.

I've been following Roxane Gay on Goodreads now for quite awhile and I'm never disappointed by any of her own books or books she recommends.
I loved the Sci-Fi and fantasy aspects of the short stories and all of them are deeply thought-provoking.
Please pick this up, even if it might be out of your usual comfort zone.
You won't regret it!

Thank you Quercus and Netgalley for providing me with an eARC.

Truly affecting collection of short stories, I really admired the way Adjei-Brenyah tailored the stories, mixing our real life sociological problems into distopian stories, looking at violence, racism, consumer culture, ignorance from another perspective overall.
Taking the world's events and political climate into consideration Friday Black has a stand on the side of humanity. Must read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and found the surreal/science fiction elements a real challenge because they were so sophisticated and well thought out. There's a lot of violence tied in with tender realism and the dystopian elements are really well thought out. It's very obvious from reading this that the sense of America, its history and its potential future is being considered in the balance. There's some lovely satire here, along with some levity to lighten the load of the grimness and the bluntness. Definitely worth the read.

This collection was definitely interesting. There's really no other word to describe it. Yes, it could read as the outlines for the next few episodes of 'Black Mirror'. Yes, sometimes you read the stories and they're eye-opening, brilliantly allegorical explorations of issues and events that impact our lives- from Black Friday (hence the title) to ingrained racism that leads to white civilians shooting black men and women who they believe are causing trouble. But otherwise, this is a very ordinary collection of stories. I think it tries to be cleverer than it really is, particularly with some stories that are only a few pages long and really don't offer much to the reader. You're left wondering if there's something you've missed- a hidden meaning that you were too dumb to figure out. So while this dystopian collection is perfectly enjoyable, I only really liked a handful of the stories and after a while, found it a push to get right to the end of this relatively short collection.

I found this collection a little inconsistent. I was raving about some stories, and then quite unfussed about others. That said, the stories on blackness and genes / social capital were stunningly perfect and I wish those worlds could be developed into longer novels.

A fantastic book which is made up of a collection of short stories. Based on the past, present. Powerful, amazing but also beautiful.
Heard some fabulous things about this book. I was not disappointed.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Quercus Books for my eARC in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started Friday Black, but it is a deliciously dark collection of stories about the extremes of human behaviour. Some of the stories make for difficult reading, others I couldn’t quite engage with.
What’s great about Friday Black is that the stories are short enough to make a point and if you enjoy programmes such as Black Mirror I think you’ll enjoy this.