24/07/2026
ON WITNESS AND RESPAIR by Jesmyn Ward and 'Pemi Aguda's ONE LEG ON EARTH were included in TIME's list of "The Best New Books to Read This Summer!"
"A bizarre epidemic is sweeping Lagos: pregnant women are drowning themselves in the city's lagoons and canals. These suicides haunt an ambitious young architect, Yosoye, who is beginning work on a luxury development heralded as a symbol of Nigeria's emergence onto the world stage. After a hook-up, Yosoye discovers she is pregnant and starts questioning everything, including 'unsensible, unapologetic' motherhood itself. Soon, she realizes the unseen menace felt throughout Lagos is stalking her. A bold stroke from 'Pemi Aguda, a National Book Award finalist for Ghostroots.
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A two-time winner of the National Book Award in fiction, Jesmyn Ward gathers previously published pieces and public addresses into a collection that limns arcs found in Black art, from Ta-Nehisi Coates's moral manifestoes to Ava DuVernay's stylish films to the canon of Toni Morrison, whom she eulogized in 2019: 'She called us out of our wandering, her voice a high, clear music in the star-suffused desert air.' Ward also finds meaning in the agonized history of her native South, illuminating our most misunderstood member of the American family."
