But there was a maturity about it as well, the way it blossomed gracefully into an exploration of love, loss, and the vulnerability needed to heal and love again. It was a messy, titillating, anxiety-inducing romantic spiral that had me invested from line one. Nevertheless, the story I found within its pages was deliciously complex. I wasn’t expecting a lofty literary read with this novel, Emezi themself having made it clear that it’s a romance book that’s quite unlike the literary and speculative books they published before. For years, I shied away.īut this year, I resolved to banish my timidity and tackle Emezi’s work from behind, sinking claws and teeth into their most recent publication and romance debut You made a Fool of Death with your Beauty, which was published in May 2022. It was hard not to feel ill-equipped to even try to ride their literary tempest.
They have been busy, and astonishingly successful. Since then, they have published six more critically acclaimed books, three in 2022 alone. They have bounced from genre to genre, storyform to storyform, leaving ground-breaking and provocative work in their wake since their debut novel Freshwater shook the literary world in 2018. Yet Emezi never takes us back there, and the delectable filth of the book’s New York City never returns – nor does its early promise.Akwaeke Emezi used to intimidate me. Feyi knows that, and wonders what will become of the affair once she returns to Brooklyn. This place is idyllic, but no relationship can exist in a dreamland for ever. The rest of the novel plays out on the island, in and around Alim’s glass house. And anyway, an affair with a celebrity chef? In a tropical paradise? Isn’t this all a bit far-fetched? The argument for boundless love here isn’t a call for open-mindedness, but a question of who is left behind. Of course their relationship will deeply hurt Nasir. Their conversations about their losses are beautiful, sensitive and damning in equal measure. In the mountainous landscape in which Alim’s glass-walled mansion sits, the pair begin an affair that, in a matter of days, they understand as love.Įmezi suggests that they fall for each other because of their shared experiences of grief – Alim’s wife died by drowning 20 years earlier. Worse, it takes its outlandishness seriously, and the fun of its opening dissipates.įeyi falls for Nasir’s father, celebrity chef Alim. It is at this point that the novel – which was never realist to the extent of relatability, but which avoided cliché and was charming in its brash humour – becomes totally unbelievable. He invites her to stay with his family on the tropical island where he grew up. She tentatively starts a relationship with Nasir. “It’s necessary to be alive,” she explains.
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