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’Pemi Aguda is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, and other publications, and has been awarded the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. More about this author >
From the publisher:
In this beguiling collection of 12 imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, ’Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.
In “Manifest,” a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In “Breastmilk,” a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother’s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In “Things Boys Do,” a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles. And in “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that’s killing the boys on his street.
These and other stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society.
Ghostroots is a gorgeous inflection point in fabulism. Set in Lagos, at the confluence of tradition and wonder, the speculative currents of these stories pull you beneath the surface of contemporary Nigerian society, carrying you to a deeper place where the laws of literary physics no longer apply. ’Pemi Aguda’s razor-sharp collection will haunt you and leave you feeling unmoored.
