The Alchemists of Kush [Kindle Edition]

Minister Faust (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

From internationally acclaimed author Minister Faust, increasingly described as one of the best writers of his generation, comes a searing new novel fusing modern realities with ancient yearning, struggle and triumph.

The Alchemists of Kush is the story of two Sudanese “lost boys.” Both lost fathers to civil war and mothers along the path of escape. Both boys were hunted and fell into violence to survive. Both came under the guardianship of mystic madmen who promised to transform them. And both vowed to become leaders who would transform their worlds, or die trying.

One of those lost boys is Raphael Garang, known to the streets of E-Town as the Supreme Raptor.

The other lost boy was Hru-sa-Usir, who lived 7,000 years ago in the Savage Lands of the Lower Nile, and known to the Greeks as Horus, son of Osiris.


AUTHORS PRAISE THE ALCHEMISTS OF KUSH:

“It was only a matter of time before the hip hop culture would invade the literary world. With The Alchemists of Kush, Minister Faust is leading the invasion. His novel is possibly the first hip hop epic. Hip hop has a short attention span on most occasions. The Alchemists of Kush gives it gravitas.”

—Ishmael Reed
Author of Mumbo Jumbo and Juice!


“Minister Faust’s first two books broke new ground in the SF field. His latest, The Alchemists of Kush, not only breaks new ground; with the story-telling skills of a modern jali, the Minister creates new vistas of history, mythology, erudition, uplift, tragedy, triumph, and contemporary community activism. Once you start the first page of this book, you won't be able to put it down until you’ve finished the last one.”

—Charles R. Saunders
Author of Imaro and Dossouye


“I started The Alchemists of Kush and kept reading until I finished. Minister Faust has the most electrifying and true voice I've read in years. The Alchemists of Kush is brilliant.”

—Sparkle Hayter
Author of What's A Girl Gotta Do? and Naked Brunch


“I loved the story, the mythology, and the characters. I found myself locked into it for hours at a time and couldn't put it down. Rich in detail ...A great book.”

—Kenneth T. Williams
Playwright of Thunderstick and Three Little Birds


“A hell of a story. A hell of a book. A hell of a style. A frenetic novel and voice—very enjoyable. Minister Faust knows how to write about male relationships, brotherhoods, and getting into the hearts of men, and about boys turning into men. The Alchemists of Kush is a triumph, not just for Minister Faust, but for Edmonton and the community of Kush.”

—Wayne Arthurson
Author of Final Season and Fall from Grace


“Inspired by a true story and set against an urban backdrop of African immigrant communities in present day Edmonton, Minister Faust weaves a masterful tale around the sacred Book of the Golden Falcon, ten Hermetical scrolls that expound upon the cross pollination of cultural themes and social considerations shared by Original People throughout the African Diaspora.

“The Alchemists of Kush is more than a story; it’s a philosophical elixir of Kemetic (Egyptian) folklore, African traditions, urban Sufism, hip hop culture, and Five Percenter pedagogy designed to transmute the challenges of colonialism, assimilation, juvenile delinquency, and moral decay into a universal solvent. Through an array of colourful characters facing unique struggles towards advancing a common cause, Minister Faust boldly takes his readers on an alchemical journey of Self Knowledge, Self Determination, and Community Action, a transformative terrain of true & living ‘gold’!”

—Saladin Quanaah Allah
Blogger, Allah School in Atlantis (ASIA)
Author of Tales of an Urban Sufi and MC on Brothers from Another Planet


“Minister Faust presents a fierce piece of fiction in a way that only he can. I was entertained, educated and fascinated with his alchemy. One of the best books I've read this year.”

—Milton John Davis
Author of Meji, co-editor of Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1046 KB
• Publisher: Narmer's Palette; 1 edition (June 13, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0055PQRG6
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,279 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

Minister Faust is a long-time community activist, writer, journalist, broadcaster, public speaker and martial artist in several disciplines.

A lifelong fan of science fiction, his earliest memories of the genre were watching Star Trek: The Original Series in black & white and having his mother read to him from Robert Heinlein's Red Planet.

After deciding to become a comic book writer and artist when he was ten, he secretly changed his ambition to science fiction novelist after glancing through the glossary to Frank Herbert's Dune. He'd planned to become an ecologist so as to gain Herbert's ecological depth, but before his first university class switched his entire enrollment to English Literature, having concluded that learning to write was more relevant to the career of a writer, and that going to endless lab classes at 7 am for four years would likely suck.

As a member of E-Town's anti-fascist movement in 1990, he and other youth marched on a Nazi skinhead gang house, the hub at that time of a series of violent assaults. Confronted there by skinheads with guns, Minister Faust held them back with nothing but the power of his words. Thus began a speaking career that has taken him across Canada and before of crowds in the tens of thousands.

Minister Faust taught English Literature in E-Town junior high and high schools for a decade, and later worked a mentor and trainer for the Keshotu Leadership Academy, an Africentric organisation whose manual he wrote.

A radio broadcaster since 1989, he hosts Africentric Radio (formerly The Terrordome), for which he's interviewed luminaries such as Tariq Ali, Molefi Kete Asante, Martin Bernal, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D., Austin Clarke, Angela Davis, Karl Evanzz, Tom Fontana, Glen Ford, Nalo Hopkinson, Reginald Hudlin, Ice-T, Janine Jackson, Michael Parenti, Ishmael Reed, Gil Scott-Heron, Vandana Shiva, David Simon, Scott Taylor, and many more.

As a radio and print journalist, he's gone as far as the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, and to the Ain-al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, to collect stories and hear directly from people living and making history.

A maverick novelist increasingly described as one of the finest voices of his generation, Minister Faust is the author of the critically acclaimed The Coyote Kings, Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and the Kindred Award-winning Shrinking the Heroes. His latest is The Alchemists of Kush, which writers and readers alike have already hailed as superb; novelist Sparkle Hayter calls the book "brilliant."

Minister Faust refers to his sub-genre of writing as Imhotep-Hop--an Africentric literature that draws from myriad ancient African civilisations, explores present realities, and imagines a future in which people struggle not only for justice, but for the stars.

He lives in Edmonton with his wife and daughters, where he also runs Canada's top bean pie bakery, Desserts of Kush.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Twin tales, one incredible read, June 29, 2011

By 

Nathan Crowder - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Alchemists of Kush (Kindle Edition)

Expectations are a funny thing. For the sake of this analogy, consider Starbucks as an example. In my mind, speculative fiction, urban fantasy in particular, has been a lot like Starbucks. (I agree there are exceptions, of course, so untwist your chainmail BVDs.) A coffee purist might be quick to dismiss the ubiquitous coffee purveyor; bitter, over-roasted beans, calorie-laden menu, a macchiato that is anything but. However they have mastered two things: training the world to drop a five-spot n a cuppa joe, and meeting expectations. True, they might not be the platonic ideal of COFFEE, but it will be the same when you order it, whether you order it in downtown Seattle or the Great Wall of China. Likewise, it seems that urban fantasy has been largely a brooding loners, predominately Caucasian, confronting supernatural threats of a European nature -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Like Starbucks, it fills the need but rarely excites me for long.

Granted, it's a tortured analogy.

So, Mr. Coffee Snob, what does this have to do with this review?

Everything.

The Alchemists of Kush by Minister Faust is no Starbucks. In fact, it blew my expectations clean out of the water, so much so that I hesitate to call the novel speculative fiction at all! This, despite the fact that the bulk of the book is split between two parallel stories with 7,000 years separating them. In one set of alternating chapters, Faust tells us the story of Hru, a boy who survives the destruction of his village only to encounter the Swamp of Death and the forces of the mysterious, and aptly named Destroyer. In the other chapters, we get the story of Raphael "Supreme Raptor" Garang, also an refugee, now living with his mother in Edmonton, Canada, in a neighborhood that contains multiple transplanted African ethnic groups. Both young men get taken under the wing of a spiritual mentor who helps them find their own inner strength, transforming them metaphorically from lead to gold.

While the Book of the Then has all the hallmarks of fantasy, with magic and fantastic beasts, the Book of the Now could be straight up YA fiction with no fantastic elements at all. We fall even further from the folds of speculative fiction when it is suggested that the Book of Then is the basis for the spiritual teachings that the Supreme Raptor receives, acknowledging that story as metaphor and not literal truth. This begs the question, "What is the truth?" And more importantly, in matters of faith, is literal truth more important than the message being taught?

The importance of faith has been fresh in my mind recently. And as the novel is, at it's heart, about a spiritual awakening, it felt perfectly timed that I discovered the Alchemist of Kush when I did.

The twin stories and characters had me drawn in immediately, and it didn't hurt that there was ample name dropping of favorite musical artists (Gil Scott-Heron among them) and comic book characters (Static and King Peacock). The narrative voice for each section was different enough as well that it helped sell the story within a story. I found myself so invested in the characters that when Supreme Raptor makes bad decisions, I found myself wincing in empathy. And thank you, Mr. Faust for giving us heroes that are real enough that they make bad decisions and have to learn from them.

In fact, without a traditional antagonist in the contemporary timeline (I know, no villain in an urban fantasy? Heresy! Glorious, glorious heresy!), the Supreme Raptor sometimes pulls double duty as his own worst enemy. And while some problems are solved with violence, it is rarely the easy solution it appears to be. More often than not, a calm head needs to prevail, and problems need to be solved with words with hard work to back them up.

That alone would make for a compelling reason to read The Alchemist of Kush, but it's by no means the only reason. The characters are rich, their battles hard fought and heartbreaking. And the resulting affirmation of of love, community, pride, responsibility, and family makes this the caliber of book I would love to see as required reading at the high-school level.

Final verdict, highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great fusion of hip hop and Sci Fi, June 15, 2011

By 

Macdem - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Alchemists of Kush (Kindle Edition)

I have been an avid fan since his Coyote Kings novel and have been eagerly awaiting another novel and it doesn't disappoint. A truly epic story with a rare unique Canadian sensibility, I highly recommend it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!, June 15, 2011

By 

aissa - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Alchemists of Kush (Kindle Edition)

In his new book, The Alchemists of Kush, Minister Faust sheds light on the struggles of African Canadian youth in a way few other books have. The readers are given a glimpse into the world of these young men, their struggles and their triumphs. With half of the story set in what is known as Edmonton's Kush, it could not be any more personal. Weaving together stories from different times and places in a way that comes together brilliantly, this is a must read.