Written by Kim Tyo-Dickerson

In a world where East African vampires are bound by human bloodlines and ancient legacies, one Ethiopian young woman dares to challenge the deepening darkness surrounding her to find her missing sister.

Nineteen-year-old Kidan Adane and her twin sister June were never supposed to return to the arcane world of their ancestors, an academic society where Black families formed intimate, exclusive bloodline alliances with vampires. Through exclusive feeding rites, the families maintained a structured, blood-soaked peace with the ruthless monsters. After the Adane girls’ parents died when they were five years old, they were spirited away in the middle of the night from their childhood home at Uxlay University by their Aunt Silia who was next in line to inherit House Adane. Placed in foster care, the girls had to leave their language and culture behind in their aunt’s bid for their freedom to live outside Uxlay’s demands, demands on their blood to feed their vampires.

Years later when June, haunted most nights by vampire nightmares, vanishes without a trace on her eighteenth birthday, Kidan is flooded with grief, rage, and suspicion. Friendless and now more alone in the world than ever, Kidan snaps. She commits a terrible crime in pursuit of forbidden information because she is certain that her sister has not run away. Instead, she grows convinced that June was kidnapped by a vampire bound to her family, Susenyos Sagad. When her Aunt Silia dies and leaves her as the last remaining Adane, Kidan is summoned back to her roots and forced to return to Uxlay, enroll in classes that she must pass in order to secure her future, and share House Adane with Susenyos, who is the last remaining vampire of her house. Her parents left House Adane to Susenyos in the event of Silia’s death and he intends to claim her family’s inheritance for his own. He is also most certainly desiring to quench his thirst with her Adane blood.

Despite her hatred of vampires, her unsettled yet defiant recognition of her own violent urges, and her alienation from Ethiopian culture, the Amharic language, and her parents’ plans for Adane House, Kidan forges the first friendships in her life with her Uxlay classmates from other Houses. Determined to survive at all costs, outwit the university’s professors and infiltrate the campus’ secret societies, Kidan uses her new friends as her translators to learn everything she can about Uxlay’s conspiracies and forge tenuous alliances. She will destroy Susenyos, claim her legacy, and uncover what happened to her sister, even if it means becoming the very thing she fears.

Some monsters are born. Others are made. And if Kidan must truly become a monster to find her sister, so be it.

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Steeped in Ethiopian language and culture, Immortal Dark is Tigest Girma’s debut novel, a sweeping, savage romantasy and dark academia story that asks Girma’s game-changing question: “What if vampires originated from Africa?” Drawing on the folkloric monster stories her mother told her as a child, stories that served as cautionary tales drawn from East African landscapes and wild animals such as hyenas, Girma completely reimagines the monstrous other as she explores and disrupts Western-centric paranormal mythologies.

When her family left Addis Ababa for her father’s work, Girma devoured popular paranormal romance books in her school’s library and watched, and re-watched, movie adaptations of the Twilight series and The Vampire Diaries series:

“I immersed myself in these weird monster girl stories that helped me cope with transitioning so dramatically from an African country to the Western world. I think that’s where my love of vampires and this escaping into a dark world came from” (Source)

Young Adult fiction does not really exist in Amharic or other Ethiopian languages, and the paranormal genre worldwide has only recently begun to include Black main characters and stories based on African mythologies, notably Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone series and the worldwide success of the Black Panther films: “Generally speaking, high and paranormal fantasy are canonically white worlds” (Source).

But Girma found herself wondering why she never saw herself or her family in any of her beloved stories. This led to a spark of inspiration and being a social media savvy young woman, Girma sent it out via Twitter: “Would anyone be interested in Black vampires?” The overwhelmingly positive response was what she needed to break out of the white character default and fully throw herself into creating something entirely new and unexpected.

Through the lens of shared oral traditions from the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, Girma decided to introduce romantic fantasy and dark academia readers to a world where Black girls are complex, desirable heroes who take charge of their own volatile lives, learning how to manage change that is outside of their control. She created a new kind of vampire character, called a draniac, a creature that survives and is kept in check through deep connections to specific human bloodlines. And then she uses her own experience of cultural isolation and loneliness during the COVID pandemic to infuse her world-building with frustrated, morally gray characters who have to respond to forces beyond their control, a universe where Blackness and Ethiopian history are powerfully centered in a fresh global context. It is a world where a transplanted Black girl can find herself as the main character, empowered to forge her own destiny as she struggles to find her place in a new country.

Girma also uses her immigrant background to deftly illustrate the painful reality of many young people who lose access to and mastery of their first languages by leaving their birth cultures at young ages. She realistically describes the ways in which forgetting Amharic disadvantages Kidan in reclaiming her family’s history and her sense of “home.” Having left Ethiopia for Australia as a young teen herself, Girma brings her own experience as a language learner to this aspect of Kidan’s character development and firmly grounds Kidan’s story in the real world. Language loss adds Gothic suspense to Girma’s exploration of draniac society, as Kidan is often truly in the dark with the conversations swirling around her. Punctuating the text at strategic moments, Kidan’s struggles to translate the messages, voices, and contexts of her new world into the next actions she needs to take to find her sister and unravel the mysteries she is confronted with at Uxlay adds a layer of existential dread. Will she understand what is really going on when she is so often linguistically and metaphorically in the dark, lost in translation?

In Immortal Dark, Girma explores the ways her characters employ their multilingual  and ancestral resources to make sense of and interact with the world around them. By developing the themes of identity, legacy, and the blurred lines between humanity and monstrosity, Girma weaves a rich tapestry of Ethiopian cultural elements. Immortal Dark is a must-read for older teens (age 16+) to adult fans of romantasy, dark academia, and horror fiction.

The first of a planned trilogy, the follow-up to Immortal Dark, Eternal Ruin, is expected in October 2025.

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Tigest Girma is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Immortal Dark. After graduating with a Bachelor of Education, she splits her time between writing and teaching. Passionate about exploring East African characters and myths, her work weaves Black stories with the dark and fantastical. In her free time, she can be found rewatching her comfort shows where the villain gets the girl. She invites you to visit her at tigestgirma.com or tiktok.com/tigestgirma.

Various interviews:
– Brewer, Robert Lee. “Tigest Girma: On the Allure of Vampire Stories.” Writer’s Digest, 4 Sept. 2024.
– Jeffery, Yasmin. “Immortal Dark: Tigest Girma Wrote a Book about Black Vampires to Indulge Her Teen Self. It Became an NYT Bestseller.” ABC News, 3 Dec. 2024.
– Jones, Iyana. “Fall 2024 Children’s Flying Starts: Tigest Girma.” PublishersWeekly.com, 29 Nov. 2024.
– Kennelly, Savannah. “1 Author, 7 Questions: Tigest Girma.” The NOVL, 2024.
– Rogerson, Karis. “Exclusive Interview with Tigest Girma on Immortal Dark.” She Reads, 29 Oct. 2024.

Book information:
Immortal Dark (Immortal Dark Trilogy, Book 1), written by Tigest Girma, published by Hachette Book Group, 2024; Imprint Little, Brown BFYR; ISBN: 9780316581448;

Interest level: Booklist: Grades 10-12; Kirkus: Ages 15-adult; Publisher’s Weekly: Ages 14-up; School Library Journal: Gr 9-Up

You can buy a copy of Immortal Dark here or find it in a library here. (Book purchases made via our affiliate link may earn GLLI a small commission.)

Reviews:
⭐️Kirkus Reviews
⭐️Publisher’s Weekly

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Kim Tyo-Dickerson is Head of Libraries and Upper School Librarian at the International School of Amsterdam. Kim has a Master of Library and Information Science from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She also has a Master of Arts in English, with a concentration in 17th and 18th century British Literature, and a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Minor in Women’s Studies, from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. With over 20 years of experience in school libraries in North America, Europe, and Africa, Kim brings a global perspective to her work. Her practice is deeply informed by her Ethiopian American family and is grounded in social justice, with a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Kim was the guest editor for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative’s #WorldKidLitMonth #DutchKidLit in September 2021. She also contributed to GLLI’s UN #SDGLitMonth in March 2021, writing on Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality. Kim’s languages are English, German, and Dutch, and she continues to explore multilingual intersections of language, literature, and identity. Connect with Kim on Bluesky and LinkedIn. Kim’s pronouns are she/her.

Katie Day is an international school teacher-librarian in Singapore and has been an American expatriate for almost 40 years (most of those in Asia). She is currently the chair of the 2025 GLLI Translated YA Book Prize and co-chair of the Neev Book Award in India, as well as heavily involved with the Singapore Red Dot Book Awards. Katie was the guest curator on the GLLI blog for the UN #SDGLitMonth in March 2021 and guest co-curator for #IndiaKidLitMonth in September 2022.