A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning Akwaeke Emezi, about five friends trying to outrun and outmatch a powerful, underground world One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A breakup that starts a spiral. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Little Rot is a whirling journey through the city’s dark side, told through the eyes of five people, each determined to run from the twisted powers out to destroy them. Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt underworld, they’re all looking for a way out of the trouble they’ve instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals. Little Rot tests how far these five will go to save each other—or themselves—when confronted by evil, culminating in a shattering denouement. With each novel, with each creation, Akwaeke Emezi shows their genius as a storyteller, as a visionary force who has created a thrilling tale of sex, power, and deviance in Little Rot. You won’t be able to look away.
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I… there is just… so much horrible shit that happened here. In a 5 star way. But every trigger imaginable. This book is not light reading.
First off, huge content warning: inappropriate sexual content throughout the entirety of the book.
I have to say this book feels out of place from Emezi’s previous works. I throughly enjoyed the books I’ve read from this author and have highly recommend them to people (Pet, Bitter, YMMAFOYD) but this one I would not recommend to a reader.
This book has shocking moment after shocking moment, that felt less like it was playing to the plot but more there for shock value. Yes the story does come full circle in the end but after all that you go through with the side quests and sexual encounters there is very very little pay off in the end and the ending extremely anti-climactic and falls FLAT.
This novel feels more like a pitch in book form for an A24 film or a dark HBO series.
I do love Emezi’s way with words. The personification and poetic writing is what moved this up from a 2.5 to a 3