How a book finds you inevitably colours your experience of it, and this one was seeded in two scenes: first in Daniel’s apartment, him full of praise and anticipation for its release; and then at Nwando’s, where I got to flip through an early copy, the author close-by in another room. This book is experimental and political, once you’re thoroughly in the world you experience so much tender feeling and care for the characters and you really get a sense of the spirituality bubbling under lagos’ surface. Overall this was an excellent book that was really readable, full of interesting detail and sought to portray a wide and diverse breadth of London life in the period. After God, Fear Women” shows how domestic violence becomes normalized for men and offers a kind of hope in the form of a power that carries women up into the sky. Because sadly in a lot of these cases we know about them because of run-ins with the courts, where the Lord Mayor is trying to fine, expel or send to the workhouse someone or other for just trying to make a living on the street.

I liked this book because it gave a description of life for poor people, living and working on the street, in London in the 1800s.His family still lived in Benin then, and he believed that all the stories his father was telling him were just stories, because he had the privilege of a strong bubble, and just enough distance. On the seventh day, he ran laps around the house, rode his bicycle, and ate vegetable soup with snails and periwinkles-all of this in a hedonistic chase, a few last hits of joy before reaping a ripe death. A book in which love overpowers taboo, and long-repressed truths about Nigerian identity hold the center. Readers will witness a dance of seduction between two beautiful women who eschew the gazes of men, and they'll recoil from the violent end to the burgeoning love between Johnny and Livinus. His latest book is Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (Duckworth, 2022), and his first detective novel will appear with Viper in January 2024.

Thomas could see the streets as his Uncle Anjos spoke, people grappling mercilessly, butting heads like rams, like they had nothing to lose: women on the sidelines picking fights with each other, children following suit. Eko, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the 'vagabonds' powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose.Jensen only lightly editorialises, to give context and in some cases stand up for a society we don't understand (there is a case where a woman who has lived as a man and their partner has their prefer pronouns used in a way that many politicians today would refuse to do out of spite). If Thomas's parents were around enough to talk a lot, he would have been warned to take everything his uncle said with a hill of salt, warned about how some resemblances should be left alone. Eko, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation - a world that challenges and fascinates us still.