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’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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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