Somber City

Somber City - Hot city; cold hearts. Somber City is an evocative novel of the promises, expectations, and disappointments of life in contemporary Nigeria, in a dismal perspective of its biggest city. The novel illuminates, through a mix of fact and fiction, a seminal moment in modern history: Nigeria's fervent passage through a period of immense oil wealth in the 1970s to a sudden descent into a cataclysmal debt trap in the early 1980s. This chaotic period, captured within the city of Lagos, is experienced alongside the protagonist Femi Falashe, a young engineer seeking to get his life back in track after a sudden job loss, as well as five other unforgettable characters: Kabiru Ayinla , a sociopathic policeman with a dark and violent past; Herbie Wayne , a disenchanted teenager with a cannabis-drenched philosophy ; Duncan Hill, the British fun-seeker who sees a promise of gold beyond the confusion around; Dennis Tom-Dick-Harry, the desperate migrant from the strife-torn oilfields of the Niger Delta ;Aliyu Mai-guard , the eponymous drifter from the desert North