Ghostroots

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
Longlisted for The Story Prize
Includes the Story "Breastmilk," Shortlisted for the 2024 Caine Prize for African Writing

One of Time's 10 Best Fiction Books of 2024 • One of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024 • One of Electric Literature's Best Debut Story Collections • A Library Journal Best Book of the Year • A Vulture Best Book of the Year • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024 • A Daily Mail (UK) Best Book of the Year • One of Elle's Best Literary Fiction Books of 2024 • An ALA Notable Book

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.