Like any metropolis where the excessively wealthy think they’re untouchable, Nigeria’s most populated city, Lagos, has a reputation for corruption and a swollen wealth gap. Bestselling author Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, is set in a city called New Lagos, a very different place from the southeastern Nigerian village of The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). When the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s ravaged Igbo villages with lynchings and riots, the privileged urbanites of Lagos found life largely undisturbed. New Lagos shares this high-rise mentality—as if tinted windows are enough to keep one safe.
Little Rot begins with a breakup, as religious Aima leaves her longtime boyfriend, Kalu, because he won’t marry her. Aima seeks comfort in her friend Ijendu, who takes her out dancing, which leads to a night of queer pleasure and then a morning of anguish. Meanwhile, Kalu attends an exclusive underground sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, and stumbles upon a nauseating scene: a group of masked partygoers with an underage sex worker. In a rage, Kalu attacks one of the men, who turns out to be the kind of man who can and will enact his own retribution. Glamorous sex workers Ola and Souraya soon become members of this tangled mess as well.
As in their 2022 romance novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Emezi writes a killer sex scene and is always willing to slip into the taboo corners of intimacy. But in Nigeria, queerness is illicit enough to get you killed, and this threat borders the whole narrative. Even in the gilded strata of New Lagos, there’s always someone more powerful than you, and everyone is touched by the hypocritical political power of Christianity, whether in the form of an evil pastor called “Daddy O,” Aima’s marriage obsession or the self-flagellation of queer characters.
Little Rot hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on. Chapters rotate through this cast of beautiful people, who are all endangered and empowered by their entanglements. “You think you’ll never be a part of things you hate,” a woman says to Kalu at Ahmed’s party. “You think you’re protected somehow, like the rot won’t ever get to you. Then you wake up one day and you’re chest deep in it.”
These characters are plunged well past their chests, submerged in realities we might prefer to avoid. With their previous books, Emezi has been heralded for courting duality in stories that are described as unapologetic, visceral and radical. But if You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty tipped over into the light, Little Rot tumbles into shadow. For every arousal, there is violence; for every moment of love, there is ruin.
