Quizlit\u2019s Book of the Month October 2024 is the scintillating debut short story collection Ghostroots by \u2018Pemi Aguda.<\/p>\n
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties<\/p>\n
In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, \u2019Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.<\/p>\n
In \u201cManifest,\u201d a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter\u2019s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In \u201cBreastmilk,\u201d 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\u2019s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. <\/p>\n
In \u201cThings Boys Do,\u201d 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 \u201c24, Alhaji Williams Street,\u201d a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that\u2019s killing the boys on his street.<\/p>\n
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. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent.<\/p>\n
Wildly inventive and odd, but written with surgeonlike precision, these stories herald the arrival of a major voice in speculative fiction. Gabino Iglesias, New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/p>\n [A] mesmerizing and unsettling debut collection\u2026 Aguda is a precise and exciting prose stylist, and her stories offer vivid insights into tradition, family, and trauma\u2026 [A] smart, playful, and compassionate collection worthy of repeated reads. Isle McElroy, New York Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n Aguda stirs her cauldron of social criticism, feminism, structural invention and grotesque gothic twists into a triumph of genre-bending storytelling, a kind of African uncanny all of her own. Christian House, Financial Times<\/em><\/p>\n Spectacular\u2026. \u2018Pemi Aguda reimagines Lagos, Nigeria\u2019s everyday rhythms with a supernatural essence, much like Bora Chung<\/a> or Mariana Enr\u00edquez\u2019 uncanny voices. Sam Franzini, Our Culture<\/em><\/p>\n \u201c\u2019Pemi Aguda\u2019s Ghostroots is a triumph! The author\u2019s strong storytelling skills give readers the gift of realistic characters and darkly imaginative stories that creep under your skin and stay buried there. Disturbing, enthralling and unforgettable. This author is now among my favorites.\u201d Tananarive Due<\/a>, author of The Reformatory<\/em><\/p>\n \u2019Pemi Aguda is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers\u2019 Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and other publications, and has been awarded the O. Henry<\/a> Prize for short fiction. She is from Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n