One Leg on Earth - 'Pemi Aguda

Genre: magical realism Published: W. W. Norton & Company (print) & RB Media (audio) My Rating: 4.5/5 stars

"This state of pregnancy is not so different from what we’re doing here. We’re gestating a city, Yosoye. Soon we will birth greatness. Isn’t it all creation? Isn’t it all holy work?"

There’s an interesting microtrend of “women walking into bodies of water” going on among spring 2026 releases. In March, we had Westward Women by Alice Martin, in which women were drawn towards the pacific ocean, to vanish without a trace. In April, we had The Underlake by Erin L. McCoy, in which two women is drawn to a rumoured utopian city beneath the surface of a lake. And now in May, we’re presented with One Leg on Earth, in which a wave of water-based suicides affects only the pregnant women of Lagos, Nigeria.

The Story:

The lonely daughter of a distant mother, Yosoye arrives in Lagos ready to change her life. Weeks after she begins an internship at a fancy architectural firm, she discovers she is pregnant. Yosoye is joyful—a new life brings the hope of connection and companionship.

But an inexplicable force is haunting the pregnant women of Lagos. As construction speeds ahead on the firm’s glossy new development on land reclaimed from the ocean, stories of the uncanny deaths in the city’s open waters reach a fever pitch. Yosoye finds herself stalked by a presence she can neither ignore nor appease—without risking her unborn baby and her precarious hopes for the future.

What I loved:

Based on ‘Pemi Aguda’s previous short-story-collection, I had high hopes for her debut novel. I can gladly say that she didn’t disappoint. Through her sensory and almost ethereal prose, she brings across an emotional, slightly disorienting, but ultimately memorable story of motherhood, agency and belonging (in multiple senses of the word).

Metaphors of water, fluidity and liminality run all throughout the story, and I was surprise to find how multilayered each managed to be in such a limited amount of pages. By the end, I felt like I’d gotten a lot more than 240 pages-worth of exploration out of these themes, and yet the novel didn’t feel dense or heavy-handed for a second.

Without spoiling any specifics, I think I particularly enjoyed the parallels Aguda draws between the creation of a city – a new way of living – and the creation of human life. There is a certain in-between-state involved in either, but only one has a name: pregnancy.

Overall, I’ve read an incredible streak of fabulous debuts this year, and this novel can join that hall of fame immediately.

It’s worth noting that this is a book that’s light on plot, and heavy on character and metaphor, and I’m aware that some readers will bounce off that. That being said, if you, like me, enjoy this kind of thing, then you cannot let One Leg on Earth float by you.

Notes on the Audio:

Although I usually love the audio-format just about equally to the written word, I would’ve preferred to read this book with my eyes, had I had the choice. Although the narrator does a fantastic job of performing the story, I couldn’t shake the feeling that her voice and inflection sounded far too mature for the 23-year old protagonist. Additionally, the narrator has a fairly heavy Nigerian accent, which adds to the authenticity and the cultural feeling of the book, but it also demands more from my listening-comprehension as a non-native English speaker.

This is obviously specific to me and will impact native speakers less, but it’s worth a mention, given I rarely have this issue with English audio.

Many thanks to RB Media for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Please not that quotes are taken from the ARC and may not match the final publication exactly.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.