INTRODUCED BY Laura van den Berg author of six books, most recently the novel State of Paradise, forthcoming in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
WHILE reading ’Pemi Aguda’s haunted and blazingly original Ghostroots, I often had the feeling of navigating a series of trapdoors. One moment I was on familiar-feeling terrain—then the bottom dropped out, and the stable-seeming self, the stable-seeming world, transfigured into something sharp-edged and mysterious.
In realities shapeshift in beautiful, unsettling, and surprising ways. An architect arrives at a house to discuss a home renovation, only to discover that the shines a light on the complex legacies of generations past. And there is, I think, a relationship between the tenacity of the past, both personal and historical, and the shapeshifting nature of these stories. They speak to the ghosts at our roots.
