NECESSARY FICTION

305pp., paperback, 4th Estate, London, 2025

ISBN: 9780008708627

A defiant exploration of cross-generational queer life across Lagos, Nigeria.

“Necessary Fiction‘s Nigerians are inseparable from Nigeria itself: brazen, willful, sexy, dynamic, explosive. They love hard, fight fierce, and love fiercer. And yet they are forced to the margins of their own society, having to navigate love and happiness under a blanket of fear, danger, and uncertainty. This is where the title becomes gospel, for they need those stories in order to live. When life has risk at every turn, family is chosen, and love is on the edge of the knife, fiction indeed becomes necessary.” Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

“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

Nigerian writer and multidisciplinary artist Eloghosa Osunde has won MoAD’s African Literary Award 2023, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction 2021, and an ASME Award for Fiction. They are the author of the novel Vagabonds!, 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 and New York City.