The Gilded Ones

The Gilded Ones is a young adult fantasy novel by the Sierra Leonean American writer Namina Forna, published on 9 February 2021. It is her first novel and the first book in a series.

Deka has grown up in a village where a blood ceremony determines whether a girl is accepted into the community, and she has always been set apart by an intuition she cannot account for. When the day arrives her blood runs gold rather than red, which in her world is the mark of impurity, and the penalty for it is worse than death. A mysterious woman then comes to her with a different future, and Deka is taken to join other girls like her who are treated as soldiers in a war. Forna has said that as a child she heard stories about strong women such as Mami Wata, the goddess of water, and the Dahomey Amazons, and about African civilisations including the Walls of Benin and Great Zimbabwe, told to her by her grandmother and father to distract her during the civil war in Sierra Leone. She has also said that the idea first came from a recurring dream of a girl in golden armour walking in a field, and that she wrote the book using elements of West African mythology and Sierra Leonean culture.

Forna has described the absence of black female heroes in the western literature she read as part of what drove her to write the novel.