This genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid's
Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping
ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman's right to her own
body.
Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter
growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a
policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah's
perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an
eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body,
daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.
The truth claws its way into Nelah's life from the grave.
As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds
dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any
of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy
her victim was on the verge of exposing--or risk losing everyone.
Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a
government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty,
nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In
sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy
pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own
oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short
fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and
Botswana's cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a
woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?
