Ace of Spades

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé is a British Nigerian author born in London in 1999. She attended a Scottish university where she studied English, Chinese, and anthropology. Àbíké-Íyímídé grew up in a very diverse region of London; her high school was “at least 90 percent Black” (419) and located in a working-class neighborhood. Àbíké-Íyímídé learned her love of storytelling from her mother, who often told her Nigerian fables as bedtime stories. After high school, Àbíké-Íyímídé went on to attend university in Scotland. For the first time in her life, she found that she “could go days without seeing another person of color” (419). She felt out of place and unsettled, and she started experiencing racist microaggressions. She started to see the impacts of systemic racism in the education system. Although she was not the subject of a sinister plot like the characters in Ace of Spades, she felt as though she was.

Inspired by the television series Gossip Girl and the film Get Out, Àbíké-Íyímídé initially constructed the narrative of Ace of Spades as a way to create fictional friends for herself, as she was having trouble fitting in at university. In her final year of university, she landed a seven-figure book deal for Ace of Spades and an as-yet-unpublished second novel. The book was an instant success. Her second novel, Where Sleeping Girls Lie, is set to be published in 2024. Àbíké-Íyímídé’s work received a lot of positive attention, especially for a debut novel. Although the novel is clearly set somewhere in America, Àbíké-Íyímídé states in her author’s note that she made the setting of Ace of Spades deliberately ambiguous because “anti-Blackness is in fact a global issue: one that can’t be diminished or pinned on one country or group” (421).