Akwaeke Emezi

A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning, visionary Akwaeke Emezi One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.

A Novel

Little Rot

Lindsay

I feel like he took a handful of dead things and he pushed his hand into my chest and dumped them there and now I’m decaying, like him. I’m rotting; I’m dying.”

It was as if the water was making her harder, scabbing up the soft pile of hurt she’d been

Did she actually feel guilty or was she performing it because that was the only world she knew, where these things weren’t allowed, where pleasure in those forms wasn’t allowed?

It was exhausting feeling this raw, running away from the memories.

Kneeling back on her heels, she looked down at him and thought about when she’d been a teenager too, when she’d first met men like him. The things they had done. The things they had done to her. There was a time when she’d been angry about it, but then she’d become rich instead and the anger had set into something cold and untouched. She had made it, made it out, made her life into what she wanted it to look like. Being able to do that, that was power. That was freedom. Justice wasn’t something she looked for or believed in, and how useful would it be anyway? People didn’t understand that. They wanted revenge; they wanted people to be held accountable in a world where that just didn’t happen. It was like expecting a rotten tree to bear edible fruit. It was never going to give you that.

 could give you other things, though, if you knew how to work the rot, if you weren’t afraid to touch it or use it. The rot could give you power.

She managed to say the word “queer” with a small sour twist that somehow acknowledged how it could be an arrow with a disgust- poisoned tip even while reclaiming it in her mouth.

There are some places that you swear you’ll never go back to because the space itself has become inseparable from the time; the there is the same as the then and you don’t know how to deal with the space if it’s inside a different slot of time.

but that’s the problem with pressing yourself down too much, folding and folding when you’re not really made of a material that’s suitable for those kinds of creases. At some point, you just spring back up when you can’t take another bending, not a single pleat more. And upon that, you spring back with force, and your momentum can be quite upsetting to people who didn’t expect you to claim your space.

She was good at that, trying not to put too much pressure on things, trying to fit into slivers of space, press herself against the edges so she wouldn’t bother anyone.

You could be so intimate, so familiar with someone’s skin and flesh and spirit, only to wake up one day and find that it had receded from you, suddenly, like a tide rushing back out into the sea, leaving you with dissolving foam and a damp heart.

"I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now."

Little Rot A Novel

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