Necessary Fiction

PREORDER — Expected release: 01 December 2026. This book is not yet available. Dispatch is subject to supplier availability and publication-date changes.

‘A vital work for our times' IRENOSEN OKOJIE‘Radical, gorgeous … a queer love song, honouring chosen family' BIG ISSUE‘Beautiful … this is prose worth spending time with' MARIE CLAIRE‘A gorgeously deeply humane book' NICOLE DENNIS-BENN‘A vivid, stirring revolution' YRSA DALEY-WARD‘The ink practically hovers off the page' KAVEH AKBAR

What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom?Across Lagos, a rolling cast of unforgettable characters seek out love in all its forms, daring to push all other relationships - with partners, relatives and friends - to the brink in the process. Stubbornly alive and brazenly flawed, they work to establish themselves in the worlds of art, music, entertainment and creativity in the city, all while reckoning with desire, fear, death and God. To build a queer community, they must all grapple with the necessary fictions that they carry for survival.‘Both deeply earnest and unique' VULTURE‘Unabashedly queer, complicated and occasionally outright hopeful' NPR‘Osunde is brilliant at character, giving the cast rich, knotty backstories that unfold in bursts of revelation' TLS‘Necessary Fiction's Nigerians are inseparable from Nigeria itself: brazen, willful, sexy, dynamic, explosive' MARLON JAMES, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings‘Osunde's writing shines … It's not just beautiful - it's transformative' BASSEY IKPI, author of I'm Telling the Truth But I'm Lying

About the author

Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and visual artist, an alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop and the filmmaking and screenwriting programmes at New York Film Academy. Her short stories have been longlisted for the 2017 Writivism Short Story Prize and published in Catapult, Guernica, Berlin Quarterly and The Paris Review where she has a column, with forthcoming stories in The Georgia Review and Gulf Coast. She is the winner of the 2021 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction