Lola Akande Livres

Suitors are Scarce in Lagos is a collection of ten short fiction which captures the myriad experiences of women, men, and young adults in one of the busiest cities in West Africa — Lagos. “Who is Sane in Lagos?” takes the reader through a typical day on the road in Lagos. In “A Bullet from Nowhere,” a newly-wed bride relocates from the countryside to Lagos to live with her husband, but falls into unintentional prostitution. In “Caged Bird,” a Boko Haram escapee couple arrives Lagos only to be sucked into the fast pace of Lagos life. In the title story, a suitor-seeking woman discovers that suitors are scarce in Lagos in spite of the teeming male population of the city. Similarly, all the other stories build themselves around the geographical fabric of Lagos. The collection interrogates the features of Lagos. It probes into the demographics that make up the city, including its people, its glamour and color, and its raw dogged determination to succeed no matter the odds. The stories excoriate the peculiar vices of Lagos. In addition to its variegated thematic elements, the collection employs simple language, humor, and sarcasm to reveal that it is not only suitors that are scarce in Lagos, but other human aspirations and desires also. Suitors are Scarce in Lagos has the potential to become a tour de force on the bourgeoning Lagos genre.

Lola Akande's The City in the African Novel: A Thematic Rendering of Urban Spaces undertakes a critical analysis of sixteen African novels that she believes are representative of city trends. Beginning with an introduction that discusses why and how the city is an important phenomenon in literature, the problematic relationship between the city and the African novel, she goes on to examine how the African city emerges from villagisation into urbanity. Her careful and definitive analyses of the general and peculiar traits of African cities; the real impact of urban life on city dwellers; how earlier and recent novelists portray the city; how literature influences the way people conduct themselves in the city while the behaviour of people in the city also influences what comes out as literature are done against the background of the symbolisation of the African city as emblematic of the inchoate African modernities where citizens' lives are wracked with fruitless struggle. She then focuses on the contributions of female writers to the study of the city by critically assessing the extent to which city life has influenced female writers differently from their male counterparts.