Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca and backs turned to the matter at hand.

Chibundu Onuzo’s sophomore novel, Welcome to Lagos, is a novel deeply embedded in the heart and soul of Lagos, Nigeria. This is book is not meant to be a tourist's guide to the city. It is neither positive propaganda nor demonstratively negative toward the culture or the state; it is simply a snapshot in Nigerian truth. Matter of fact but witty, emotional but not melodramatic. It is a balance that any reader can enjoy. The prose drips with the Lagosian culture and the atmosphere around the characters within these pages is busy with a sense of urgency and the fervency of life that is often overlooked in comforts of first-world life. Skillfully weaving multiple storylines together, Lagos laces together a tale where the powerful meet the poor head on, where Robin Hood- morals still exist and where the cultures of London and Lagos blend and clash as colorfully as the gorgeous cover art that wraps this. I opened these pages not knowing what to expect as someone unfamiliar with the culture but, as I’d hoped, this novel took me by the hand and showed me the way, navigating me through the gates of wealth and under the bridges of poverty with both grace and heart.

Welcome to Lagos features a cast of unly companions who are bound together by circumstance but wield their circumstances into the bonds of a true family. When Chike and Yemi desert the Nigerian army—a capital offense—they know that they must escape down roads less traveled until they can get as far away from the Niger Delta as possible. Along the way, they meet Fineboy, a mischievous youngster with a carefully crafted American accent who dreams of becoming a radio presenter and whose scrappy street smarts they come to depend on; Isoken, a beautiful adolescent separated from her family in the fighting who’s still traumatized and guarded from an attempted rape she suspects Fineboy of being a part of; and Oma who is fleeing from the damaging fists of her abusive husband who knows the next time he hits her could kill her. This unly band of characters just trying to survive finds themselves brushing up against the law in more ways than one and changing the course of history when an unly intruder to their home comes a-knocking.

This novel is so full of the soul and ethos of Nigeria. The dialogue drips with authenticity right down to the colorful pidgin dialogue that Onuzo skillfully weaves in, authentically portraying a culture while navigating readers who are unfamiliar with such dialogue. There are several references and language switches you may not immediately grasp unless you intimately understand this world yourself, but that makes it all the more realistic and immersive in setting. The best literature isn’t watered down for the masses. Sometimes, we have to go it.

Short chapters made for a quick and jaunty pace. There’s very little, if any, fat to be trimmed on this story—just enough to create a trim and attractive figure, not bloated with unnecessary prose that should have been shaved away instead of sitting a pot belly at the center of the narrative. Welcome to Lagos links the narratives of each character together, even introducing new characters with their own POV chapters late in the novel. It creates the effect of effortlessly swinging from vine to vine, each one a new chapter with voices that overlap then recede into the distance, reappear then recede again as another voice takes over. There’s something in this novel for everyone, whether you are familiar with the culture or not. This is a novel that addresses real issues head on while avoiding soapboxing and proselytizing. Rape, domestic abuse, war, corruption, poverty, class relations, family, and duty all play major parts in this narrative production in a way that is as poetic as it is gritty.

“Say it out loud so it doesn’t have power over you again. My husband used to beat me. I only married him because I was afraid of being a spinster for the rest of my life. Say it.”
“I was attacked by some men. They tried to rape me. I can’t forget. I’ve tried everything but I can’t forget. Semen everywhere. On my face. On my stomach. In my ears. I can still feel it.”

The sense of place and scenery here is alive. You can feel the dust in the air and the boli on your tongue. Welcome to Lagos offers up beautiful prose and thoughtful innuendos while never shying away from real matters, hard glimpses in the mirror for both the characters and their country.

“In your country, the descendants of the biggest thieves, are they not the ones making the decisions? Your House of Lords. Who made them so? Was it not by oppressing the poor, by swallowing all the land? Today, we are calling them ‘my Lord,’ calling them ‘Honorable.’ Your banks built on the slave trade, Lloyds, have they returned any compensation?”

The characters here are vivid with voices that raise loudly above the noise of the city, their storylines woven together with care and utter believability. Many of the chapters are marked with newspaper excerpts, both tying together the storylines and highlighting the state of Nigeria, functioning as a back drop for the novel’s unfolding. That was a clever choice. It allowed Onuzo to fill in the circumstances of Lagos, the state of the country and its people, without having to pound it home ad nauseum in the narrative, allowing room for social commentary at its finest—biting and poetic. And for that Welcome to Lagos earned 4 stars and a high recommendation from me that you add it to your shelves! ****

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**Thank you so much to the publicity department at Catapult/Counterpoint Press for reaching out to me and sending me copies of this lovely book!**

P.S. If you've never been to a Chibundu Onuzo signing, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go to one. She's hilarious and engaging, down to earth and extremely, extremely intelligent and thoughtful when she speaks. Check out my interview with her on my Instagram, and it will soon be added to my blog as well!african contemporary-fiction cultural-surveys ...more114 s karen3,994 171k

”The only time something is wrong in Nigeria is when you’re caught.”

i struggled at the beginning of this book. short chapters with many characters coupled with my limited reading time meant that i was having to start-and-stop this a lot, and every time i picked it back up, i would have forgotten the differentiating details between the characters and their backstories were blurring, but once everyone actually got to lagos and their separate stories started to become one story, things not only got easier, they got excellent.

first and foremost: lagos. onuzo does an excellent job ‘welcoming’ a reader to the city of her birth, displaying it, dissecting it, bursting her story up out of as many different aspects as possible to give an exuberant cross-section of the flavors of the city and the attitudes of its people. as much as it makes me cringe to use a cliché, lagos is as much a character as chike or isoken.

as for the human characters, they’re a marvelously mismatched bunch of travelers shaped by fate and circumstances into an unly family; rough around the edges, but essentially decent and well-meaning. it’s basically The Breakfast Club scenario, where people from different experiences and opportunities are forced into close quarters for an extended period of time during which their differences become less apparent and working towards a common goal reveals how a they are and how much they have to offer one another and yadda.

it’s less wonderfully cheesy than an 80s movie, but there’s a sweetly optimistic vibe to this that sets it apart from other novels i’ve read set in lagos, a city of crime and struggle that rewards creative ingenuity but leaves many trampled in the streets. (meant figuratively, but in the “traffic cop” scenes, it can also apply literally)

this group of strangers meet while in transitional stages of their lives - leaving something painful in their rearview for the bustling anonymity of lagos and its possibilities, before becoming caught up in someone else’s crime and presented with the opportunity to choose between self-interest and altruism.

not as gritty as i usually prefer, but not all sweetness and light, either. she’s got a really strong voice and i’m unquestionably going to get my hands on whatever she does next.

Bravery was to dash out of the bomb shelter and grab the child left crying on the veranda. Courage was to go to the stream the day after a bomb had scattered your friend on that path because water must be fetched to sustain the life that was left. Everyone saw bravery but courage was in secret.

come to my blog!from-publisher-or-author83 s K.J. CharlesAuthor 62 books9,747 Read

I enjoyed this enormously. It's got a quality that's a bit A Fine Balance if it was set in Nigeria and wasn't traumatically distressing.

Basically this is a found family story: two soldiers who desert rather than commit atrocities in the Niger Delta, a militant they accidentally capture who actually just wants to be a radio announcer, a teenage girl whose family has been killed, a woman fleeing her rich but abusive husband, and a corrupt politician on the lam, all of them sticking together to survive homelessness in unfamiliar, desperate Lagos.

This is not sounding cheerful, I realise. But what's lovely here is that we really see these people holding together--looking out for one another, finding connections, supporting each other. It's a scary world where terrible things happen, but also a place where people can be kind, and loyal, and loving, and really strive to help others because they care, and in that it's really hopeful in a very true way. (Because yes, terrible things happen all the time, but so do good things, and there's no great universal truth in just showing awfulness.)

A hugely engaging read with characters about whom we care intensely, and a really satisfying plot, treading the line well between hope and dismay at the state of things. Excellent. african55 s Paul1,268 2,042

This book was quite a mixture, but despite some reservations I did enjoy it. There is a warmth and humanity about it and it tells a good story. Onuzo is still only 27 and is clearly a talented writer. The story concerns a group of misfits travelling to Lagos. Chike is an officer in the Nigerian army; he is serving in the Niger delta and fighting militants in the area. He is disillusioned and not sure he is on the side of right. He and his subaltern Remi desert and set off for Lagos. They soon come across Fineboy, one of the militants who also wants to travel to Lagos and become a DJ. Isoken, a sixteen year old girl who is fleeing from an attempted rape by militants (possibly including Fineboy) joins them. On a bus they meet Oma, who is fleeing from domestic abuse. They somehow become a rather motley unit travelling together to Lagos.
The city of Lagos is another character almost and is drawn very vividly by Onuzo with its bustling busyness, sounds and sights, severe poverty and great wealth:
“Lagos is no different from anywhere, except there are more people, and more noise, and more.”
There is a richness and complexity to the story which could be described as Dickensian. The five survive on the streets and eventually find an abandoned apartment which they take over. The owner, a former Minister of Education turns up one day, on the run with a suitcase of money. They detain him and debate what to do next. Eventually they decide to use the money for its original purpose and start to find out what local schools need and purchasing it for them.
At this point the plot takes a rather odd direction with the introduction of a local journalist, the BBC and a reporter in London, the last part of the novel doesn’t have the same power and vibrancy of the first two thirds.
There have been criticisms of the novel that say it has too much of a feel-good factor and minimizes some of the issues it addresses by its instinctive faith in human nature. I think this may be something of a misreading as Onuzo does not shy away from challenging the effects of colonialism:
“The whole of Nigeria’s fortunes rose and fell on what foreigners would pay for her sweet crude”
The corruption, the death squads and the censorship are all there interwoven with the plot and the very able main five characters.
I did really enjoy this novel, there are flaws and I struggled with the last third, but it is life-affirming and rather touching.readingwomenchallenge39 s Lark BenobiAuthor 1 book2,640

A jarring, enlightening, humane story, read in the audiobook version with great empathy by Robin Miles. It's the story of modern Nigeria. It's the story of regular people trying to do the right thing at a time when "doing the right thing" can end your life. Onuzo adds exactly enough background and scenic detail to make the story come alive and to keep even those unfamiliar with current events in Nigeria feel they can follow and understand. I was not able to follow the book with just the audiobook however--with some books I need to review and supplement the audio with the printed page and that was the case here. This is not on account of the writing being particularly complicated--it is very clear writing as a matter of fact--but there are several threads of stories here, and many characters, and it became more enjoyable when I had both audio and written forms to alternate between.2018 africa nigeria32 s Alice807 2,962

Starts off wonderfully, but falters towards the end. Very interesting comments on politics, history and current events though, and worth the read.contemporary-fiction27 s Dagio_maya 970 295




Corruzione nigeriana come specchio di modelli occidentali dove certi sistemi sono assodati da tempo.
Come figli che cercano maldestramente di seguire il modello paterno, gli amministratori e la classe politica nigeriana, scimmiotta e provoca quella catena di flussi migratori. Gente che fugge dalla Nigeria così come da tanti altre nazioni africane dove si pratica una cleptomania legalizzata.
La corruzione, insomma, è un sistema che ha radici antiche e non conosce confini.

Questo, in breve, è un po’ il succo di un interessante articolo di Chibundu Onuzo pubblicato sul Guardian


Questo, però, è anche il succo di Benvenuti a Lagos, ultimo libro della scrittrice nigeriana.

Per spiegare di cosa parla questo romanzo potrei prendere in prestito le parole di una nota canzone nostrana:


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