LITTLE ROT

276pp., paperback, London, 2024

Also published in the USA in 2024.

"There’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, Little Rot, is a masterwork of the form ... The story takes place over the course of roughly 28 hours, during which a man flees an assassination attempt, another has a knife plunged into his kidney, and yet another is strangled to death while having sex. Astonishingly, none of these events feel gratuitous. Instead, they’re conveyed with an inexorable precision, even an elegance; the reader feels like an unwilling witness to the world’s dark truths. The effect is mesmerizing." New York Times

"Little Rot, like all Emezi’s books ... measures the difficult push and pull between the self and the world ... Little Rot is about hypocrisy, toxic masculinity and sexual cruelty. It is a novel oozing with dirty secrets and ugly reveals. The deliberately outrageous tone is not for the faint-hearted: enter at your own peril. Emezi is here to shred the facade of society, to unsettle and subvert rules and beliefs." Guardian

Akwaeke Emezi is the author of the novels You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji; the young adult novels Pet and Bitter, and Dear Senthuran: A black spirit memoir (2022 ALA Stonewall Prize for Best Nonfiction Book).