VAGABONDS!

303pp., paperback, London, 2022

 

Eloghosa Osunde's debut novel set in Lagos, Nigeria.

“Lagos has featured in any number of novels by Nigerian writers ... but usually the gaze is relentlessly male ... Vagabonds! is different: it tells compelling stories of survival, about women seizing agency in spite of the forces ranged against them. Adewale Maja-Pearce, London Review of Books

“If you read one debut novel in 2022, this should be it. With care, compassion and a gimlet eye for hypocrisy, Osunde builds a universe from Lagos, Nigeria’s little-seen citizens: The gay, the trans, the abused and others. Magical realism works to great effect in connecting these stories, especially when spirits Tatafo and Èkó are involved, and readers will remain rapt to the end.” Los Angeles Times

Nigerian writer and artist Eloghosa Osunde is an alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop, and the New York Film Academy. She has been published in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica and Catapult. Winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of a Miles Morland Scholarship, she is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow.