As much about beauty, love and life as it is unbearable grief, loss and death, Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji floored me.

'If nobody sees you, are you still there?'

Before we ever open the book, we are primed to mourn Vivek, and absolutely we do. The devastation of his family is vividly written and excruciatingly felt in the wake of such presumed brutal loss. Though, so to is the vividness of life and the fullness of love. Before he was lost, he was found. Before he was buried, he was seen.

'I shook her, called both her names, as if it would do anything. We were under a flame-of-the-forest tree. An orange flower fell down and landed on her chest.'

Told, almost in a subversion of a propulsive murder-mystery narrative archetype, through shifting POVs that paint incomplete but always sincere tableaus, we learn the truth of Vivek's life and death. Somehow, despite the tears I blinked away on the bus, the revelation is hopeful.

'I often wonder if I died in the best way possible – in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true.'

All the elements I loved most from YMAFODWYB can be found here – without the hallmarks of the romance genre that I didn't enjoy so much. Emezi writes grief and joy with such tenderness, forms character with such reverence, and weaves it all together with startlingly beautiful prose. It's exactly this intricacy that makes their writing so completely absorbing.