The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass
Leslye Penelope
Paperback/Ebook/Audio
ISBN: 978-0316594691
Redhook, August 11 2026, 496 pgs

Like most twins, Zahara and Annica Douglass are just as different as they are alike. Zahara is an aspiring ballerina putting her dreams on hold to help her widowed mother meet the family expenses. Annica is a computer whiz trying to use her knowledge to ease the burdens that treating her sickle cell disease places on her mother and sister. After their father’s death, the twins’ connection keeps them going despite their mother’s grief and their own deferred dreams. Not even Annica’s sudden disappearance can break their bond, even though Zahara is suddenly the only person in the world who remembers that her twin ever existed. Her attempts to bring her twin’s existence back into the world lead her down a twisted path that starts during the Vietnam War and leads her to discover generational secrets and a group of people with special abilities that defy logic.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything quite like this before. It’s essentially historical science fiction written like a thriller, seasoned with a strong dollop of cultural folklore from the African diaspora focused through a Haitian lens. This uniqueness carries through into the book’s multimodal storytelling, which uses tape transcripts, emails, chat logs, computer code, and regular prose to travel through the plot. This sounds complicated (and is!), but it’s all executed in a way that reads so simply that it takes a while for the complexities of the story to really be absorbed. Even though the story starts strong, the suspense and emotion of it grabs you slowly. It takes a while to get fully invested, but that’s a good thing.

The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass is set mostly in 1999, with Y2K fears and techno-paranoia looming over everything. Before any of the excitement sets in, it’s a lot of fun to look back at a world where most people didn’t have cell phones and the thought of using your real name in your email was unheard of. This isn’t really played for nostalgia, though. Rather, it’s sobering to revisit the anxieties that the early internet inspired about human connections to each other and the natural world. Those fears haven’t disappeared—they simply exist in updated formats, and it’s interesting to see what the characters in this book do to try and get ahead of them. It’s even more interesting to think about what may have happened to society had those fears been given full rein. It’s also reassuring to see people with chronic illnesses, neurodivergence and high-pressure, stress-seeking personalities depicted in a late ’90s setting. All types of people have existed in all time periods, even if the language to describe them and the treatment they might need has evolved.

This is a truly unique read that uses unexpected paths to tell an unexpected story. If you enjoy early X-Force comics (specifically the “Old Ghosts” storyline), the South London SF series Supacell, or Justin A Reynolds’ SF romance The Opposite of Always (trust me on this one), you’ll probably enjoy this too.