Aima and Kalu are a long-time couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city's corrupt underworld, they're all looking for a way out of the trouble they've instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals.
There’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, Little Rot, is a masterwork of the form ... Mesmerizing ... What gives Little Rot its vitality are its overlapping love stories, its characters’ longing, their acts of devotion and tenderness in defiance of a world in which a soft heart is a liability ... It’s a testament to how complete a sense of contamination Emezi creates in the rest of the novel, particularly in the stomach-turning and dramatically perfect final twist that drags even the reader into complicity. We come away troubled, unsettled — and in some subtle way changed.
Holding it all together is a plot that ducks and dives with cinematic verve ... Little Rot isn’t a perfect novel – Aima, for instance, blurs as a character, and cynicism snubs some of its deeper questions – but it bears out those words of warning with unflinching dedication.
Resists easy categorization. It has the dark twists and pace of a thriller, the ambitious scope of literary fiction, the language of poetry and the yearning of romance ... For all its merits, veers toward cynicism.
