This is an interesting collection of short stories, which stand alone but are linked by all being set in Lagos, and many of them have an aspect of the supernatural embedded in the storytelling. Some reviewers call them horror stories, which is not a genre that I am very familiar with (neither in books nor in movies), so maybe I am way off base about this, but they seem more associated with magical elements which don't often go the way you might hope they would. There is also a visceral quality to these stories, like the author is not one to hold back on gritty details when telling a tale.
The most important context for all of these stories is Lagos itself. The crush and overwhelm and class structure of the city and its countless inhabitants colors and constrains everything here. Many of the families involved are internal migrants, having left the Nigerian countryside for the city. When one character asks her aunt why no one had ever told her about her grandmother, the older woman replies “There are stories we leave buried so our children can move without weight.” It turns out there is quite a lot of weight in Nigeria, and the characters who travel in to the capital discover it in various different permutations once they get there. The unsettling multiplicity of the author's approach is present here: she blends societal forces, parental expectations, intergenerational trauma, economic precarity, personal guilt, and they all constrain the agency of her characters.
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