Ghostroots

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.

Vorwort
A darkly witty and brilliantly original debut collection of short stories - all set in Lagos, and all with a supernatural edge

Autorentext
'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. Her short-story collection Ghostroots was a finalist for the National Book Award, longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing (for the story 'Breastmilk').

Klappentext

The supernatural looms over the grime and sweat of everyday life in Lagos in this dazzling collection of stories from a prize-winning young Nigerian writer.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING

*'Thrilling and disturbing' Financial Times*
'Excellently uncanny' Daily Mail
'You'll find it hard to tear yourself away' Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

The Lagos of these twelve sinister and beguiling stories is multi-faceted, peopled by Pentecostal Christians and exasperated atheists; by tight-knit extended families and struggling single fathers. Here are characters cursed by guilt, bound by the ties of ancestors and community; or enchanted by the allure of mysticism and would-be prophets. There are gossips and party girls - and a schoolboy followed home by a group of tribal masquerades, cloaked in feathers and twinkling beads. Yes, his mother has warned him not to bring strangers home, but he is sure she will understand ...

Exploring the dark borders between psychology and superstition, these feverishly imaginative stories of trauma, betrayal, terror and love lay bare the forces of myth, tradition, gender, sexuality and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy, and glinting with humour and insight, they announce a major new literary talent.

INCLUDING THE STORY 'BREASTMILK', SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAINE PRIZE FOR AFRICAN WRITING 2024

Zusammenfassung

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.