Nigerian-American writer Chinelo Okparanta has announced her third novel, This Impossible Life, to be published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Harper Collins, on November 10, 2026. The announcement, made on Instagram, was as intimate as her fiction. “Although it’s fiction, this book draws from some of my lived experiences — from growing up in a turbulent Nigeria to relocating to the US,” she wrote. “Like Ava, I have suffered the kind of deeply experienced anxiety that results in my faulty mind’s attempt to control the ostensibly uncontrollable. And, like Mumsie, I am learning the sacrifices that come with motherhood.” She also described how Alohan’s character was partially inspired by her relationship with her brother, with whom she shared so tight a bond that she sometimes experienced compathy when he fell sick. It is the kind of author’s note that makes you want to read the book immediately.

The novel follows siblings and spans Nigeria and the United States, moving through grief, migration, and the particular psychic weight of lives lived between worlds. Okparanta also revealed that the book features sex workers and offered a characteristically candid explanation: she has never worked as a sex worker in Europe, but has been propositioned more than once during her travels across the continent, the propositioning party convinced she was. “Writer that I am,” she wrote, “I have imagined the life circumstances that could have led me to that path.” It is the kind of detail that signals a novel unafraid of the full texture of its characters’ lives.

Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her debut short story collection Happiness, Like Water was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was nominated for the Kirkus Prize and Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She has won an O. Henry Prize and two Lambda Awards, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. This Impossible Life is her first novel in several years and, by the sound of her announcement, her most personal yet.

Read the synopsis below:

Eleven-year-old Alohan and his four-year-old sister Ivie are the children of a rainmaker, who performs elaborate rituals to bring or hold back the rain. One day, the rainmaker’s luck runs out: it pours on the wrong person’s wedding, and the repercussions for him and for his wife who accompanies him to the wedding are deadly.

Orphaned and alone, Alohan is quickly forced into an early adulthood, charged with providing for and protecting Ivie. The two siblings become each other’s entire worlds, bound by loss and loyalty. But just as they begin to build a life for themselves, a lapse of judgment leaves them entangled with a wealthy couple’s nefarious scheme. The two are set on drastically different paths, constricted by the ruthlessness of those who hold great power and privilege, and those who are underfoot – who must, and will, do anything merely to survive. What unfolds is an incredible journey of crime and betrayal, misunderstanding and misfortune, spanning continents and decades: from Nigeria to the United States to Italy, and from the homes of the wealthy elites, to those of the destitute—crossing paths, at each turn, with those who steal, con, and traffic in lives.

At the novel’s heart is the love between Alohan and Ivie. Told with captivating force, insight, and compassion, This Impossible Life is a gripping saga of two siblings’ survival, and of whether the love that binds them will be enough to overcome the most unforgiving of fates.

This Impossible Life is available for preorder now.