The Memory of the Ogisi (The Forever Desert, #3) by Moses Ose Utomi Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Forever Desert #3
Pages: 120
Published by Tordotcom on July 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
The epic conclusion to Moses Ose Utomi's critically acclaimed Forever Desert series, The Memory of the Ogisi shatters every truth, destroys every lie, and is a story of oppression no one shall ever forget.Even deserts have a beginning. Even gardens have an end. Even water has a story.
One thousand years after Tutu and five hundred years after Osi the City of a Thousand Stories stands resolute on the edge of the Forever Desert. A teeming oasis, water flows into every mouth that thirsts and knowledge sprouts in every mind that hungers for it.
Ethike is an Ogisi, one of the City's many historians, who has devoted his life to studying a little-known figure named Osi. Unfortunately, the city has never approved any of his research papers and if he doesn’t find Osi’s story soon he will be stripped of his position.
Desperate to keep himself and his family from losing everything, Ethike ventures into the Forever Desert in search of the Lost Tomb of Osi. If he can find it, he will finally be able to prove his worth to the City’s elders and, more importantly, cement Osi’s role in history. But history is a tale told by those with power. What Ethike uncovers beneath the sand is far beyond anything he could have expected….and it is extremely angry.
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My Review:
The end is the beginning and the beginning is the middle and the middle is the end and over and over and over again. The Memory of the Ogisi is the ending of the myth, legend, parable, teaching story, all of the above that began in The Lies of the Ajungo, middled 500 years later in The Truth of the Aleke and ends 500 years after that with The Memory of the Ogisi.
Or does it?
Now that we see it, whole and entire, (possibly, as far as we know) it’s clear that The Memory of the Ogisi, as memories often are, is both the beginning and the end of the epic tale of the Forever Desert. Because this story is an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, over and over and over again.
It can’t be a mere Möbius strip, because Möbius strips are passive and benign in comparison. It has to be an ouroboros to get the full, pardon me, flavor, of the story, because it needs that extra bite. It needs the pain and crunch of the snake’s tail passing into the snake’s own mouth and getting chewed up and eaten by its digestive acids over and over again.
Because the story isn’t quite the parable we thought it was. All the way back in The Lies of the Ajungo, it was a story about greed and subjugation and more than a bit of exhausted and desperate belief in the lies that had been told for generations – because that was the only way to survive.
At the end, it’s a story where it looks like the truth might set people free. But it doesn’t.
Only for the cycle to repeat in The Truth of the Aleke. The myths told on the second iteration are different, but the result is the same. A corrupt elite ruling over an utterly downtrodden class of barely surviving workers who are fed lies to keep them docile.
Until the cycle turns again, the truths are buried, new lies keep the people oppressed in a different city, and a new truthteller arises. But this time, that truthteller believes they’ve discovered an even greater truth – one that requires, not shouting from the rooftops, but an even more oppressive regime of greed, corruption and lies.
Because the whole, sad story of The Forever Desert has been the oldest story in the book. The one about the ends justifying the means in pursuit of a ‘Greater Good’ that isn’t good for anyone at all.
Escape Rating A+: This series has always had the air of myth and legend, all the way back to its opening in The Lies of the Ajungo. What has changed over the course of the trilogy is the depth of the lesson that it’s teaching. Or rather, perhaps, that more sand has piled overtop that lesson and we’re sinking deeper in the depths and suffocating in it.
The stories manage to work as parallels, and parables, and yet they dig deeper into something that gets uglier as it goes even as the story itself is told more lyrically and beautifully.
The stories individually look like quests. Even more beguiling, they look like quests that can be fulfilled and the world can end better than it began. But that’s not what happens, because the true story, what the Ogisi remember down the centuries and continue to teach for centuries more, is about the darkness at the heart of humanity as a whole.
It’s not a story to be read if you’re already depressed about the state of the world, because there’s no light at the end of this tunnel. The situation in the Forever Desert is forever because humans are going to, well, human, in any situation which they find or create for themselves. And any attempt at making that better is only going to reach that same point sooner or later.
So the only way to prevent things from trending towards the worst is to start with them already at the bottom and attempt to suppress it out of them one degradation at a time. This is not in any way, a hopeful story. But in its ending, as in the endings of each of the tales within it, it feels true. Which is the most depressing part of all.
