Saving the life of Good Witch Willow, Lilah Goodluck receives five unwanted predictions as a reward, and when the first three predictions come true, she is sent into a panic since, according to the fifth prediction, she only has a week to live unless she can stop the fourth one from happening.

This first volume in the Library of America edition of Octavia E. Butler's collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre-Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that...