Dominion
- Judith D Collins
- Aug 19
- 7 min read
Narrators: Andre Giles; Angel Pean; Bahni Turpin; Dion Graham
ISBN: 9781250402349
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Publication Date: 08/19/2025
Format: Audio
My Rating: 5 Stars + (ALC)
DEBUT NOVEL
"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
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
My Review
Addie E. Citchens bursts onto the scene with a Southern family drama that crackles with tension between the haves and have-nots in DOMINION, plunging readers into a riveting exploration of misogyny, hypocrisy, and patriarchy.
With a voice that blends grit and humor, this is a book club gem and marks Citchens as an author destined for the spotlight.
About...
Welcome to the small town of Dominion, Mississippi, where we meet the Reverend Sabre Winfrey, the powerful leader of the Black Seven Seals Baptist Church.
Priscilla, the church’s First Lady, has spent years turning a blind eye to her husband’s affairs and misdeeds, all to preserve their glittering reputation and opulent lifestyle. Sabre wields power not just from the pulpit, but as a real estate mogul and barbershop owner, his influence stretching across Dominion.
On the surface, she is the picture of Southern charm, but behind closed doors, Priscilla numbs her pain with secret sips and pills, her smile hiding a world of hurt.
They have raised five sons together, but it is their youngest, Emmanuel—nicknamed “Wonderboy”—who seems to have it all: dazzling talent, striking looks, charm, and athletic prowess, poised to leave for college and claim his place in the spotlight.
Enter Diamond, a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, who falls hard for Emmanuel. She idolizes him, convinced he is her ticket to love and security, never suspecting the shadows that linger beneath his shining exterior.
Is Emmanuel violent? Is he like his father?
Priscilla and Diamond may have to face the harsh reality about the men they love and their own identities. Will both women be able to see beyond the devil’s charms to see the real evil that lies beneath? How will they move forward?
“On the evening of February 14, 1976, my husband explained to me that because Eve ate the apple, I would have to eat the snake. I knew in the scheme of things, this probably wasn’t so bad a thing to do, especially since this was my husband, but try as I could, I could not get comfortable with it.”
My thoughts...
DOMINION is a razor-sharp, taut family (dysfunctional) drama filled with destructive behavior, deadly sins, power, misogyny, influence, and the women who love them.
Brilliantly exploring contrasts of good vs. evil, haves and the have-nots, no matter the class or privilege, there is evil and violence, and those who ignore and accept those behaviours.
The author’s writing is impressive as she guides readers through these complex characters and emotions, pulling no punches, balancing the darkness with wit and humor, true Southern style. She truly shines with the two women characters.
Dominion is told through the POVs of Priscilla and Diamond as we see these women bound under patriarchy and their men, their seductive power and charm, all hidden behind the church and spirituality.
The novel highlights the human element within religious institutions, exploring how ambition, desire, and secrets can intertwine with faith and family dynamics in ways that create compelling narratives.
A stellar debut of secrets and sins. I can't wait to see what comes next!
Audiobook...
The audiobook was exceptional, narrated by a cast of stars Andre Giles, Angel Pean, Bahni Turpin, and Dion Graham (favs), making the characters come alive, keeping you engaged with an array of emotions for a highly entertaining listening experience.
Top Audiobooks of 2025!
Highly relatable and timely, when listening/reading, you may think of the hit TV show Greenleaf showcasing the unscrupulous world of the Greenleaf family with scandalous secrets and lies, their palatial family mansion compound, and their sprawling Memphis mega-church.
Recs...
DOMINION is for fans of Terah Shelton Harris, Brit Bennett, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and authors who appreciate their work for its unflinching portrayal of the exploration of faith and morality, and the South. Like these, with Citchens you may find the novel dark, unsettling, intense, but filled with dark humor and thought-provoking themes as a powerful depiction of the human condition.
Special thanks to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for providing an advanced listening copy for my honest thoughts. #MacAudio2025
@JudithDCollins | #JDCMustReadBooks
My Rating: 5 Stars +
Pub Date: Aug 19, 2025
Top Audiobooks of 2025
Praise
Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the O. Henry Prize for “That Girl”
An Indies Introduce Pick
A Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch
A Must-Read: Literary Hub, The Millions, Garden & Gun
“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)
“Soaring . . . A stunning debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“This stellar, utterly assured debut . . . simply crackles . . . [Citchens is] a bright new voice.”
—Brittany Allen, Literary Hub
“A new voice as fierce and lucid as the Delta sun in August . . . Searing.”
—C. Morgan Babst, Garden & Gun
“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
About the Author
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.
