Necessary Fiction
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 22 Jul 2025
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Vagabonds!: an audacious and eye-opening exploration of cross-generational queer life in Nigeria.
What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone?
In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria.
Across Lagos, one of Africa's largest urban areas and one of the world's most dynamic cities, Osunde’s characters seek out love for self and their chosen partners, even as they risk ruining relationships with parents, spouses, family, and friends. As the novel unfolds, a rolling cast emerges: vibrantly active, stubbornly alive, brazenly flawed. These characters grapple with desire, fear, time, death, and God, forming and breaking unexpected connections; in the process unveiling how they know each other, have loved each other, and had their hearts broken in that pursuit.
As they work to establish themselves in the city's lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Osunde (Vagabonds!) takes a kaleidoscopic view of queer Nigerian life in this vibrant tale of a diverse group of friends and relatives and their internal struggles. The young Maro searches for true love while leaning on his relationship with wealthy businessman Alhaji, who's old enough to be his father. Psalm, an artist, loves his girlfriend Asang, but their relationship becomes increasingly strained after he cheats on her with the ghost of Love, an old friend who died three years earlier. Love came to him through a "side door in his mind" and now takes Psalm on trips to a Lynchian realm where others in similar relationships hang out together. Meanwhile, May talks with Aunty G, an older lesbian, about the pain of rejection by her family and her struggle with gender identity. Ultimately, she declares: "I'm not a man; I'm May. I'm not a woman; I'm May." Osunde shines in their voice-driven narration, smoothly integrating Nigerian Pidgin into the novel's crystalline prose. "I am serious about being alive," announces a young man named Ziz, who left his judgmental family behind for a new life in Lagos. "Because of this, there is nothing I can't survive. Anybody who knows me knows that; the rest na breeze." There's much to love in this bighearted novel.
