'Pemi Aguda

Twenty-three-year-old Yosoye arrives in Lagos eager to begin a new chapter of her life. Working for a prestigious architectural firm, she finds herself immersed in a world of glamorous social gatherings, ambitious colleagues, and exciting possibilities. Her company is developing Omi City, an extravagant new housing project built on reclaimed land and presented as a symbol of Lagos’s bright future. For Yosoye, the development represents progress and the promise of a city reinventing itself. But beneath the glittering surface, something is deeply wrong. Stories of pregnant women walking into the city’s waters and drowning begin to spread, while the construction of Omi City continues to reshape the landscape and displace the past. When Yosoye discovers that she is pregnant herself, the strange events around her become increasingly difficult to ignore. As she investigates the mysteries surrounding the development, she is forced to confront unsettling connections between motherhood, urban expansion, and the forces that haunt the city. Blending literary fiction, horror, and Nigerian folklore, Aguda’s atmospheric novel examines the human and environmental costs of progress. It explores the complicated relationship between women and their bodies, the weight of ancestral histories, and the question of what a society sacrifices when it builds its future on buried ground.