Vagabonds!

Lagos is the backdrop for this story, from its crowded streets to its sheltered family homes. A varied group of people, some tormented by their pasts and others refusing to bow to them, try to live authentically while facing peril, malevolent forces, and love.

Like the people Nigerian law criminalizes, the novel's vagabonds are those whose very existence is treated as unlawful: queer people, the poor, the displaced, the restless, and rogue spirits. They dwell in temporary places, slip through the city unseen, and find themselves drawn to ghostly visitations, long-held grudges, and parallel realities.

The narrative follows a wide range of characters. There is a chauffeur employed by a dissolute politician who holds power over life and death, and a celebrated fashion designer who becomes a mother to a daughter already grown. A pair of women in a lesbian relationship share a gentle bond that sheds unexpected light on their involvement in the underground sex trade. A wife and mother begins attending a clandestine spiritual gathering that alters how she sees everything. Their stories overlap in open-air markets, underground nightclubs, churches, and hotel rooms, as spirits that command the city's dark forces seize and test these vagabonds.

Whether they are fleeing danger, meeting lovers in secret, searching for who they really are, or defeating their own shadow selves, the characters lean on one another. The story builds toward a once-in-a-lifetime assembly that brings the cast together and closes on an unexpectedly hopeful note.

Mixing gritty realism with myth and fantasy, the book looks closely at the minds, bodies, and inner lives of people under pressure, and at their moments of triumph.