West Oakland Book Club X Oakland Public Library

This book club meetup is all about good conversation and community. Whether you’ve read every page or just started the book, bring your thoughts, questions, and vibes.

This month, the West Oakland Book Club dives into My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, a darkly comic and razor-sharp novel that blends family drama, crime, and biting social satire. Set in modern-day Lagos, the story follows Korede, a dutiful nurse whose younger sister Ayoola has a bad habit—she keeps killing her boyfriends. With each crime, Korede is pulled deeper into a web of loyalty, morality, and survival, forced to choose between protecting her sister and protecting herself.

Braithwaite’s prose is lean, witty, and compulsively readable, unraveling themes of beauty, power, and patriarchal expectations in Nigerian society. Both suspenseful and wickedly funny, My Sister, the Serial Killer asks how far blood ties stretch when love and justice collide, reminding us that sometimes family is the most dangerous bond of all.

**About West Oakland Library**

The West Oakland Branch of the Oakland Public Library, established in 1977, serves as a vital resource and gathering place for the West Oakland community. Situated at 1801 Adeline Street, the branch offers a diverse collection of materials, including books, DVDs, CDs, magazines, and newspapers for patrons of all ages. Notably, it houses a dedicated African American collection, reflecting the rich cultural heritage of the neighborhood, as well as smaller collections in Arabic and Spanish, catering to the area's linguistic diversity. The library also features graphic novel collections suitable for all age groups, supporting a wide range of reading interests.

Beyond its collections, the West Oakland Branch provides various amenities to support community engagement and learning. Facilities include accessible bathrooms, computers, copiers, fax machines, meeting rooms, parking, printing services, scanners, and study rooms. The branch hosts a variety of events and programs, such as family storytimes and tenants' rights clinics, fostering a sense of community and providing valuable resources to residents. As part of the Oakland Public Library system, the West Oakland Branch exemplifies a commitment to serving the educational and cultural needs of its patrons.

**About Oakland Public Library**

The Oakland Public Library is a part of the City of Oakland in California and has been in existence since 1878. They have:

• a Main Library
• Seventeen branch libraries
• The Second Start Adult Literacy Program
• The Tool Lending Library
• The African-American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO).
• The Oakland History Center

They offer a range of additional services for residents of Oakland and California. They get support from the lively Friends of the Library group and the Library Advisory Commission. They also have local Library Friends groups around the city. More at: https://oaklandlibrary.org/

**About Sistah Scifi**

Started in 2019 by Isis Asare, Sistah Scifi is the first Black-owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy in the United States, as validated by the American Booksellers Association, and has a community of nearly 60K points of contact with engaged readers across the country. The bookstore has been featured in The Seattle Times, KQED, Oprah Magazine, Buzzfeed, USA Today, KTVU, The New York Times, South Seattle Emerald and many more.

Sistah Scifi's mission is to double the number of Black and Indigenous Speculative Fiction authors on the New York Times bestseller list by 2030. Read more here.

Check out Sistah Scifi's bookshop.org page

**About Oyinkan Braithwaite**

Oyinkan Braithwaite is the best-selling author of MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER (2018) which has now been translated into 30 languages and sold millions of copies. It won the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller, the 2019 Morning News Tournament of Books, the 2019 Amazon Publishing Reader’s Award for Best Debut Novel and the 2019 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, among several other prizes, and longlisted for both the Booker Prize 2019 and the 2020 Dublin Literary Award. Oyinkan has published several short stories over the last few years for a variety of publications and platforms, including Audible and McSweeney’s. She also wrote a novella The Baby is Mine in support of adult literacy. Alongside her work as a novelist, she is also a screenwriter with two projects in development for television and one for feature film, the latter an adaptation of her first novel. Her new novel Cursed Daughters will be published in Autumn 2025.

Host or Publisher Sistah Scifi