Ghostroots

(Paperback)

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Description

Ghostroots vividly evokes "the specter that is Lagos, bright and glittering from a distance, nothing but grime and sweat up close."

The thirteen dazzling stories in this collection reveal starkly different facets of the city, from its streets full of "bustling pedestrians, evangelizing preachers, bus drivers yelling for passengers" to its markets, polished offices, humble family homes, gated estates, and haunted houses. Against these varied backdrops, in stories grounded in the terrestrial world but well traversed by ghosts and spirits, characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties to family and community, from which it sometimes seems there can be no escape.

In "Manifest," a young woman's mother begins to see the ghost of her own abusive mother in her daughter's face. Shortly after, the young woman is overtaken by increasingly wicked and destructive impulses. This spooky tale of possession invites us to question the extent to which we control our own destiny, and how evil is perpetuated down the generations. In "Breastmilk," a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. When, months later, she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her own mother's feminist values and doubts her own fitness for motherhood. In "The Hollow," a junior architect shows up to take the measurements of a house her firm will be renovating; but the house, with its logic-defying layout and walls that seem to shift, gets the best of her. When the owner divulges the troubled history of the family who lived there, the architect is flooded with her own suppressed memories.

These and other stories in Ghostroots dramatize the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.

Reviews

Ghostroots is the kind of collection you dream of discovering and reading - from one of my favorite living writers * Jeff VanderMeer, author of Hummingbird Salamander *
A marvellously unsettling collection where the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other to create real fire * Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog *
'Pemi Aguda is an astonishing talent. She's inventive with form and playful with sentences. In Ghostroots, the delightful speculative conceits of the stories are elegantly, even architecturally, balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human being in the world. A wonderful collection from a truly gifted writer * Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds *
'Pemi Aguda is spectacular. This book is a big, strong river. Once you are caught in its currents, you flow with it no matter where it runs. And it runs through gorgeous and startling places * Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene *
In this perceptive and astute collection, 'Pemi Aguda tells of the metaphysical cracks on the surface of contemporary Nigerian society with an uncompromising humane touch * Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still With You *
In this perceptive and astute collection, 'Pemi Aguda tells of the metaphysical cracks on the surface of contemporary Nigerian society with an uncompromising humane touch -- Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still With You
Here you'll find breathtaking stories of the familiar and the strange, full of empathy for characters trying to bridge chasms between communities, families, generations, and their ghosts. 'Pemi Aguda builds worlds with blade-like acuity. You'll be caught in their sway and transported. -- Diane Cook, author of The New Wilderness

Author Bio

'Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the winner of the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers' Award and a graduate of the Zell MFA program at the University of Michigan. Her work has been published in American Short Fiction, Granta, One Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and The Best Short Stories 2022 and 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Valeria Luiselli (2022) and Lauren Groff (2023), among other publications.