Nigerian author Eloghosa Osunde has a second novel on the way titled Necessary Fiction. Exploring the drama centering around a Lagos-based found family, the book will be published by Riverhead Books.
We are excited to see how Osunde’s second novel lives up to its potential after the high ranks reached by her debut novel. Osunde’s debut novel Vagabonds!, received high acclaim right off the bat. It won Paris Review‘s 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the 2022 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Vagabonds! explored the hidden stories of Nigerian characters – vagabonds whose existence is outlawed like the queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. But Osunde’s second novel Necessary Fiction reads a bit differently.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the new novel is about a found family in Lagos bound by blood and choice, following what is uncovered between them after a significant loss. Based on the synopsis, we can tell there will be drama, grief and difficult choices, focused on the domestic sphere instead of the cityscape. We cannot wait to read it!
Osunde announced the news on Instagram, sharing her excitement about the novel and revealing some juicy details:
First: meet NECESSARY FICTION (aka Book Two) — a novel I lived with for years; an instrumental addition to this world I’m building; an actual star. A rock, a rock, a rock. I finished the first draft of this last year as you know, and since then it has been a journey and a half.
GOOD BOY as a story changed my life when it was published by @parisreview and then won the Plimpton Prize. But before then, that story had siblings and cousins only I had access to; it had children in my care. In a sense, this book is a family album of the people mentioned in Good Boy and how the shape(s) of their lives change and change and change again around a series of inciting incidences. With this book, you’re about to see a work of imagination that sits sweetly in a form that closely mirrors my mind. I can’t explain what this work did to me in the making, but it makes me happy to know that NF and I are each other’s. This one will mark things irreversibly. This one will live many rich lives.
“This is how we get through our lives: we tell ourselves stories so that what’s happening becomes something we can live with. Necessary fictions.” — Lidia Yuknavitch
This quote by Lidia Yuknavitch is near the opening the book, and I love that because I found it in an essay of hers when I needed it the most. NECESSARY FICTION is a book about courage, about love, about leaving, about surviving, about living against the odds, about pushing life back when pushed, about turning walls into corridors, about the stories we carry like talismans on our way to the life of our dreams. Some of my favorite characters I’ve ever written live between these pages.
View this post on Instagram
Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer, multidisciplinary maker and world bender. She won The Museum of the African Diaspora’s African Literary Award in 2023. Osunde is an alumna of the Lambda Literary Workshop (2019), New York Film Academy (2017) and the Caine Prize Workshop (2018). They are a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow and the 2021 prose judge of Fugue Journal’s annual writing contest.
Congrats to Osunde on the upcoming book!
COMMENTS -
Reader Interactions