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A Novel
by Eloghosa Osunde
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.
"[A] kaleidoscopic view of queer Nigerian life in this vibrant tale of a diverse group of friends and relatives and their internal struggles…Osunde shines in their voice-driven narration, smoothly integrating Nigerian Pidgin into the novel's crystalline prose…there's much to love in this bighearted novel." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Osunde's prose is beautiful, if at times a bit overwrought, and they have clearly put a lot of thought into their characters, whom they treat with tenderness and compassion. But there's not much in the way of a plot, and the novel tends toward the scattered and shambolic. This is a tone poem of a book, a novel that relies on connections, but never fully connects. A messy book about messy people." —Kirkus Reviews
"These candid and descriptive stories tackle divisive situations shown through the day-to-day happenings, steamy escapades, passionate musings, and bittersweet predicaments of spirited individuals." —Booklist
"This book is exquisite and excruciating. It quickens your pulse and burns inside you for days. With elegant, lean, searing language, Eloghosa Osunde reminds us what it really means to be alive. A gorgeously deeply humane book, which is indeed, necessary." —Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun and Patsy
"I can't believe how alive Eloghosa Osunde's Necessary Fiction is, how supersaturated and smart. Osunde writes with the cataclysmic dazzle and sneaky spiritual ache of Denis Johnson but pitches it toward us here in the digital age. I love their prose, their characters. Hustle, heart, privacy, sex, yearning so strong it buckles you — it's all here. The ink practically hovers off the page." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
"Necessary Fiction lives up to its title and beyond—a luminous mirror hall, a prism refracting human need and want, generational patterns and heart work and chosen family carved from the city's chaotic sprawl. In true Eloghosa Osunde fashion, it's a vivid, stirring revolution with echoes that transcend time." —Yrsa Daley-Ward, author of bone and The Terrible
This information about Necessary Fiction was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eloghosa Osunde is an award-winning writer and multidisciplinary artist. Winner of MoAD's African Literary Award, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and an ASME Award for Fiction, they are the author of the critically acclaimed novel Vagabonds!, which was a New York Times Editors Choice and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. Their writing has been published in Paris Review, Granta, BASS, Georgia Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. They move between Nigeria, Nairobi, New York City, and wherever else their work calls. They can be found online at eloghosaosunde.com.
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