Faber lands ‘decadent’ new novel from Akwaeke Emezi

Faber has acquired a “decadent” new novel, Little Rot, from Akwaeke Emezi. 

Associate publisher Louisa Joyner acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada and Nigeria, plus audio, from Jessica Bullock at the Wylie Agency. Little Rot is scheduled for publication on 4th July 2024. 

Emezi’s exhilarating new novel follows five people over the course of a weekend which will brutally upend all of their lives. “When Kalu drops Aima at the airport, it marks the end of their four-year relationship. Shattered and broken open, he thinks that’s the last he will see of his girlfriend,” the publisher said. 

“But Aima is drawn back into Lagos: to the scandalous, decadent nightlife of her best friend. Reeling from the break-up, Kalu accepts an exclusive invitation to one of his best friend’s sordid, global parties – a way to escape, if only for a night. Just as two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur collide into the scene, everything goes to hell when Kalu’s actions plunge them all into a whirling descent through the corrupt and glittering underbelly of the city.” 

Emezi’s last novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, was a Sunday Times bestseller, nominated for the Good Reads Choice Awards for Romance and was a Zoella Book Club pick. Amazon Studios won screen rights with Michael B Jordan’s Outlier Society attached to develop it as its first major film acquisition.  

Joyner said: “The publication of a new Akwaeke Emezi novel is always an event. With passion, characteristic joy and truth, Little Rot engages and explodes on the page. This novel is set in contemporary Nigeria but its truths about a society on the brink of its own self-immolation, as it gorges itself out of existence, has as much in common with late 18th-Century France and the fall of Rome. A major new work from a globally significant writer!”