Freshwater
by Akwaeke Emezi
Her mind is inhabited by spirits with their own agenda.
For you if
you want a novel that treats mental illness and spiritual cosmology as the same phenomenon without reducing either
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Ada is born with too many entities inside her — ogbanje, Igbo spirits who live within her and narrate sections of the novel in their own voices. Emezi draws on Igbo cosmology to describe what Western medicine would call dissociation and trauma. The result is formally unlike anything else — a memoir-adjacent novel that refuses the Western psychological framework while also refusing to romanticize what Ada goes through. The most original Nigerian debut in a generation. A dispatch from inside an interior world that two different traditions try and fail to fully explain.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Nigeria • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Nigerian author
- Themes
- identitymental illness
Related Viewing
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