Pemi Aguda’s “One Leg on Earth” Examines The Haunting Price of The New Lagos

There is a particular kind of dread that comes with watching something you love evolve into something unrecognizable. Lagos residents know this feeling intimately — the disappearing shorelines, the fishing villages flattened overnight, the displacement. Pemi Aguda’s debut novel, One Leg on Earth, takes that dread and makes it its thesis question:  what is the cost of progress in a city that recreates itself by erasing the people who made it? It metabolises and confronts that reality.

Aguda’s novel arrives on the back of considerable anticipation. Her short story collection Ghostroots was a finalist for the 2024 US National Book Award, and the kind of acclaim that follows a writer into their debut can be as much of a burden as a gift. She carries it well. One Leg on Earth is confident, atmospheric, and for anyone paying attention to the Lagos of 2026, very timely. The story follows Yosoye Bakare, a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of university and newly arrived in Lagos for her National Youth Service Corps year. She lands a job at a sleek architectural firm working on Omi City, a luxury waterfront development built on land seized from a fishing community. Soon after, she falls pregnant after a hazy encounter she can barely reconstruct, and almost simultaneously, strange things start happening in Lagos: pregnant women across the city are walking into bodies of water and not coming back.

This is the theme Aguda explores most effectively: the parallel processes of birth and development, of a woman carrying new life while a city undergoes its own transformation. The novel’s central metaphor is clear; Aguda makes it work throughout the story. One character puts it plainly to Yosoye: they are doing holy work at Omi City, bringing a new city to life, just as Yosoye herself carries one. Creation is creation, except that some creations require destruction to make room for themselves, and the novel refuses to let that slide.

What makes Aguda’s version of Lagos register so sharply is how closely it matches the Lagos we already know. Eko Atlantic, Banana Island, and the relentless northward march of the Lagos’ elite real estate are not just background details; they show a kind of violence that comes dressed in architectural renderings and promises of modernity. Omi City in the novel operates as both a literal setting and an allegorical vessel: a symbol of what the city tells itself it is becoming, and a cover story for what it is actually doing to the people it cannot accommodate.

One Leg on Earth is not a protest fiction in any straightforward sense. The horror in the book is the folk kind — the kind that understands a community’s collective anxieties and gives them a face. The drowned pregnant women haunt the novel not as victims but as something stranger and more unsettling, something that is harder to define. Are they casualties? Resisters? Are their deaths a tragedy or, as a character suggests, the most radical assertion of bodily autonomy available to them? The novel refuses to settle this question, and that refusal is what makes it brilliant.

Yosoye is a carefully crafted character written with a certain deliberate incompleteness. She arrives in Lagos feeling like what she describes as a hollow outline, hoping the city —and then the pregnancy— will fill her in and give her life dimension. The prose that surrounds her is sensory and sometimes disorienting, shifting between the mundane textures of Lagos commuter life and something that feels older and more elemental. One moment, she is crammed in a packed bus, breathing in the heat of other bodies; the next, the dead women are at the edges of her vision, beckoning. Aguda does not draw a clean line between these registers, and that is intentional.

The novel has its tensions. Aguda has talked about her cover art and the collaborative process behind the three distinct editions for three markets —Nigerian, UK, and American— which speaks to her attentiveness to how a book presents itself to the world. That same attentiveness sometimes tips into a quality that some readers have found frustrating: the writing is exquisite and precise but lightly plotted, more interested in accumulating atmosphere than in driving forward. When the climax arrives, it is quieter than the buildup seems to promise. But there is an argument that this is the novel’s strength rather than its failure —Aguda is writing about a city that perpetually defers its crises rather than resolving them, and perhaps a neat ending would have been its own kind of dishonesty.

There is also something worth sitting with in the novel’s invocation of historical memory. When a character describes the ancestors who chose collective death over enslavement by the Ibadan warriors, or when another invokes enslaved Africans who seized ships and walked back into the ocean, Aguda is connecting the story to a long tradition of resistance. The novel reminds us that Lagos is not only a city of the present. It is built on a history of dispossession and resistance that its glass towers are designed to hide.

One Leg on Earth refuses to forget this history. At a time when Nigerian cities are consuming themselves in the name of development, Aguda has written a novel that asks, with eerie precision, what lives we are willing to sacrifice to the idea of progress.