Dominion, Addie E. Citchens
Dominion, Addie E. Citchens
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Dominion
A Novel

Author: Addie E. Citchens

Narrator: Andre Giles, Angel Pean, Bahni Turpin, Dion Graham

Unabridged: 7 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/19/2025

Synopsis

"This novel will grab you in the gut and hold you there. It’s absolutely outstanding. Once I entered this world I didn’t want to leave.” —Roxane Gay, author of Opinions

"The cast delivers powerfully nuanced performances. [Narrator] Dion Graham’s Sabre is both cringe-inducingly unctuous and disturbingly seductive. [Narrator] Bahni Turpin’s Priscilla is piercing, hilarious and sympathetic in her human emotion...[Narrator] Angel Pean’s performance is as multifaceted and resilient as her character’s name..."—BookPage

In this taut Southern family drama featuring multicast narration, the sins of a favorite son rock a small Mississippi town.

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.

Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.

A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free.

"Narrator Bahni Turpin delivers his mother's biting commentary with hilarious sarcasm...Diamond, portrayed by [narrator] Angel Pean in a silky, sensual narration, is filled with love for the unreachable boy...[Narrator] Andre Giles's third-person interludes offer haunting glimpses of Emanuel's life of power and perversion."—AudioFile

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Addie E. Citchens

Addie E. Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Oxford American’s “Best of the South,” Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. She was the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Dominion is her first novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on March 26, 2025

Whew. This is one hell of a novel. In Dominion, people’s secrets are largely out in the open. Priscilla, the First Lady of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church has long looked the other way from her husband, the Reverend Sabre Winfrey Jr.’s indiscretions but to do so she has turned to vices tha......more

Goodreads review by Carl on June 09, 2025

Publication date: 19/08/2025 Dominion is Addie E. Citchens’ flammable debut novel, written under the writer’s fellowship from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, awarded to new and exciting voices. Set in the small town of Dominion, Mississippi, the novel follows a wealthy Black Baptist family torn between de......more

Goodreads review by Cheryl on August 12, 2025

As a lover of historical fiction especially late U.S. historical fiction I was excited to read this piece that primarily takes place in the 1990's. The character development especially of the females who's stories were key to the novel were well written and developed. It was interesting watching the i......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on June 05, 2025

A lot to recommend this novel, especially in terms of voice and setting. I hope we see more from Citchens. It wasn't until nearly the end of this novel that I understood what it was, and I wonder if I would feel differently about it if I'd gone in knowing that. This is unusual for me! I usually pref......more

Goodreads review by Tini on August 14, 2025

In Dominion, Mississippi, secrets are currency, power is gospel, and the truth is ugly as sin. 4.5 stars rounded up. In the small town of Dominion, Mississippi, Reverend Sabre Winfrey is more than the spiritual leader of Seven Seals Baptist Church - he’s a man who controls businesses, politics, and th......more

Quotes

“A stellar Southern drama of secrets and sin . . . This Faulknerian, God-troubled novel is an earthly scorcher shot through with unforgettable images . . . Readers will be stunned.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This stellar, utterly assured debut . . . simply crackles . . . [Citchens is] a bright new voice.”
—Brittany Allen, Literary Hub

“A wise, sophisticated, and impressively crafted novel of secrets, longing, and strength.”
—Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness

“This is one hell of a novel. Dominion is about two women who see what they want to see, until they no longer can. The storytelling is layered and beautiful and ugly at the same time, and beneath the story there is the other story about small communities and secrets and powers and how feeling like you have to live up to unspoken expectations can destroy you and everyone around you from the inside out. It captures church community and the South and the gulf between the haves and have-nots with precision and keen observations. This novel will grab you in the gut and hold you there. It’s absolutely outstanding. Once I entered this world I didn’t want to leave.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Opinions

“This is the rarest and finest kind of storytelling, where both the tradition and innovation get plucked by the most audacious artistry I’ve experienced in a long, long time. You read this and see there’s literally nothing narratively Addie E. Citchens can’t do with her skill, her will. We have never in our reading lives experienced such an imagination, a gumption, a breathing Mississippi, and a craftsperson this locked in at this stage of her career. My god, we are lucky.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“It’s rare that a debut author produces a work of such tenderness and ferocity, but that’s what Addie E. Citchens has done in her unforgettable Dominion. Rich with metaphor and thrumming power, it tells a vivid and unforgettable story of two Mississippi Black women. If Citchens didn’t exist, the South would invent her. But she does exist and our common literary soil is enriched because of it.”
—Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters

“In Dominion, Addie E. Citchens teaches us how ceremony works. She shows us how much it matters whose voices take center stage, which questions we ask, and whose stories we avoid. And the costs of not listening to our own voices and the prophetic wisdom of Black women and girls. Somehow Citchens worked a horror and healing into the same tightly woven work of brilliance. I laughed and cried with and even prayed over these characters. I could not stop turning the pages. And the ceremony worked. Nothing is the same now. Addie E. Citchens is a world-changing writer.”
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

“I loved this brilliant novel. Dominion is a must-read. Addie E. Citchens tackles misogyny with urgency, humor, authenticity, and unflinching honesty. Citchens has crafted an unforgettable work of art that exalts the beauty and strength of Black womanhood against the backdrop of the patriarchy. Thought-provoking and entertaining, this incandescent novel will stay with readers.”
—Annell López, author of I’ll Give You a Reason

“Mississippi is a mystifying language. In Dominion, Addie E. Citchens speaks it with a dazzling tongue. The book is at once ancestral and newborn, drunk with sugary grits beauty and sobering with a Black woman’s truth. Citchens shows us that, in a world roamed by two-legged beasts whose robes are stitched with the blood and ruin of willful women, getting happy and getting free are vast contradictions.”
—Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

“Looka here, Dominion is the Black-ass book we needed—from the collective storytelling to the language to the big love we have for one another. Addie E. Citchens tells stories like my aunts and uncles playing spades, toggling unexpectedly between subtlety and explosiveness, with a side of good ol’ shit-talking and a deep knowing.”
—Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat

Awards

  • BookPage Best Books of the Year
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