One Leg on Earth
Nigeria

One Leg on Earth

by 'Pemi Aguda

Summary

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.

Reviews

Login to leave a review.

No reviews yet. Be the first!

You might also like

'Pemi Aguda
'Pemi Aguda

’Pemi Aguda is a Nigerian writer from Lagos whose fiction blends literary realism, speculative elements, and folklore to explore motherhood, identity, community, and the lingering influence of the past. Originally trained as an architect in Nigeria, she later earned an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Aguda’s short fiction has appeared in publications including Granta, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, One Story, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her stories have received several honours, including O. Henry Prizes, the Nommo Award for Short Story, and the Writivism Short Story Prize. She also received the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut short-story collection, Ghostroots (2024), was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and received nominations for several other major literary prizes. Her debut novel, One Leg on Earth (2026), combines Nigerian folklore and contemporary urban life in a haunting exploration of pregnancy, environmental change, and the costs of development. Aguda lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

View author page
Published
2026
Author
'Pemi Aguda