You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty

Brimming, barely contained, with bone-deep grief and all-consuming awakenings of the sexual and soulful kind, Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is a uniquely compelling story about bravely risking setting lives aflame for love, for a chance to embrace a new, fulfilling life.

Five years have passed since Feyi’s husband died in a car accident. Though still grieving, her life is beginning to shift. She’s getting herself together as an artist in Brooklyn and, with the encouragement of her straight-talking, loving best friend, she’s ready to have sex for the first time since her husband’s death — urgent sex with no strings: “Feyi didn’t think she could stand it, to be touched so tentatively. People had turned her into webbed glass after Jonah died; it made her feel like a relic, not a person.”

Feyi’s first frantic carnal encounter spirals into her jetting to a Caribbean island with a guy whose well-connected art collector father, also a famous celebrity chef, has seen her art and offered to introduce her to a major curator who wants to show her work in a major exhibition of Black diaspora artists on the island.

Seismic emotional shifts erupt the moment Feyi steps foot in the stylish, tropical mountain home, where she faces tremendous conflicts of loyalty and pulls between the past and her possible future. Messy, moving, heart in-your-mouth stuff, told in dazzling prose.