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What Remains: Still Seventeen
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 212
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In a near-future Lagos where neural extraction technology allows the wealthy to purchase the senses of the desperate, Nyla Okonkwo has spent eight years closing contracts she has trained herself not to examine. She is one of twelve brokers worldwide qualified to handle the Meridian protocol - a sixty-day full sensory extraction that carries a forty-million-dollar commission and a clinical disclosure no candidate is given enough time to read.
Then she sits across from Amara Osei.
A seamstress in Makoko with a mother on dialysis and two children who do not yet know what she is about to sign, Amara is the perfect candidate: economically desperate, medically motivated, and entirely without institutional protection. She wears a necklace of seventeen cowrie shells. Nyla, at sixteen, had owned one exactly like it - and left it on the edge of a clinic sink the morning she signed her first contract.
What follows is not a thriller of action. It is a thriller of recognition. Of the moment a woman who has spent a decade not looking finally looks. Of what it costs to break a system you built, when breaking it requires confessing - to a court, to a survivor, to yourself - that you knew exactly what you were doing all along.
What Remains is a work of speculative literary fiction set in a near-future Lagos, exploring bodily autonomy, complicity, and the architecture of consent under economic duress. For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility and Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police. A novel that refuses easy redemption and asks, instead, what survival is worth when the price is paid by someone else.
Themes: consent under economic coercion, neural ethics, complicity, motherhood, the architecture of corporate harm, survivor moral responsibility, post-colonial Lagos as literary landscape.
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