Sometimes a book title alone is enough to make you pause. And then, a few pages in, you realise it has delivered on every promise it made. Abi Daré's debut novel introduces us to Adunni, a girl born and raised in a small village near Lagos, Nigeria. She loses her mother young, her father dismisses her hunger for education without a second thought, and she is married off as a teenager before she even has the chance to understand what womanhood might mean on her own terms. Raped and crushed by one calamity after another, she eventually finds herself in a car headed for Lagos, and it is precisely at that moment that this novel truly ignites.
Once the city enters the picture, so does a whole constellation of characters, and Daré handles them with the confidence of someone who knows this world intimately, its textures, its hypocrisies, its warmth, its cruelty. At its core, this is a novel about what poverty and the absence of education do to a
