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Nicole Cuffy’s first novel, “Dances,” details the life of a 22-year-old Black ballerina, the youngest and first Black woman to become lead dancer for a fictional New York ballet company. The book was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.
Cuffy’s second novel, “O Sinners!” follows Faruq, an investigative reporter as he becomes imbedded in a secretive cult, the nameless (not capitalized). After gaining the trust of members of the nameless in New York, Faruq is invited to travel to northern California where the cult has established the Forbidden City deep inside a secluded 16,000-acre redwood forest enclave.
After scrutiny from upper-level members Faruq meets Odo, the cult’s charismatic Black leader. Odo is a veteran of the war in Vietnam whose scars from that conflict are both physically visible and spiritually formative. Faruq is introduced to the 18 Utterances, the statement of the nameless’s core dogma.
Faruq’s experiences in the Forbidden City are one of three interconnected story arcs. The second arc describes Odo’s time as an infantryman in Vietnam where, as his friends are killed one by one, the foundational tenets for the nameless are laid.
The third story arc is the screenplay for a documentary titled Nero which describes the earliest days of the nameless in a dusty rural Texas town named Burning Hill, and the cult’s confrontation with the chief preacher at a rabidly conservative fundamentalist church.
As Faruq is drawn more deeply into the inner workings of the cult, and an increasingly deeper relationship with its leader, Faruq is forced to confront his buried emotions about the death of his mother, the more recent death of his rigidly observant Muslim father, and ultimately, his own estrangement from his family’s faith.
“O Sinners!’ moves at a leisurely, but well-paced tempo. As the narrative alternates between the trio of story arcs the reader is drawn further and further into the evolution of Faruq’s and Odo’s motivations and beliefs. It is likely that the book will be on lists of most important novels of 2025.
