Ghostroots: Stories
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- 13,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction
Includes the Story "Breastmilk," Shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties
In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, ’Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.
In “Manifest,” a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In “Breastmilk,” 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’s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In “Things Boys Do,” 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 “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that’s killing the boys on his street.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bracing speculative parable from Phillips (The Need), set in a near future devastated by climate change, a woman loses her job to the robots she helped build. The "hums," as the AI bots are called, have become ubiquitous in every corner of society, rendering May Webb and her equally unemployable husband, Jem, increasingly desperate. As a result, May volunteers for a face-altering experiment, one that makes her identity undetectable to camera phones and security clearances. After the procedure, she takes her family to their unnamed city's exotic botanical garden to spend three nights in a cottage, where lakes, forests, and streams still exist. She also forbids the children from using the devices they've grown reliant on, hoping for a brief respite from the selfies and hums flooding their feeds. During their stay, though, they're surveilled by the hums, which capture May briefly losing track of the children in the park. When the family returns home, May discovers she has been canceled and may lose her children for good if the hums deem her guilty of negligence. This chilling vision of a near future, one where its dwellers "can't avoid the void," resonates unnervingly with the way things already are. Readers won't be able to look away.
