In her brilliantly inventive debut collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi takes readers on a surreal and haunting journey through a landscape on the edge of time. At the border with another world, a line of people wait for the gates to open; on the floor of a lonely room, a Born Winner runs through his life’s achievements and losses; in a suburban garden, a man witnesses a murder that pushes him out into the community. Struggling to realize the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters of Dark Neighbourhood roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame. With a detached eye and hallucinatory vision, they observe the worlds around them as the line between dream and reality dissolves and they themselves begin to fragment. Electrifying and heady, and written with a masterful lyrical precision, Dark Neighbourhood heralds the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in fiction.

Guardian Best Fiction of 2021  

‘Onwuemezi, who is also a poet, has said she thinks first of rhythm when she writes. When she deploys her considerable skill for sound and metre with purpose, the resulting lyricism makes for compelling reading... there are stories here that give shape to incoherence with a precision and style that is dazzling.’— Baya Simons, Financial Times

 

‘[A] beautiful, vertiginous and enriching first collection ... there is a folkloric power in the way Onwuemezi combines clarity and mystery, evoked in a dramatic, memorable soundworld.’— David Hayden, Guardian

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Prototype. Dark Neighbourhood, her debut story collection, was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2021, and was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022. Her short story ‘Green Afternoon’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022.

Fitcarraldo, 2021, 160pages.