Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad

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At a point, the POVs switch to the males in the stories, but the message remains the same: Lagos men take stupidly selfish decisions regarding love and sex. The last page in the book felt like the author was patronizing ‘Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad’.

This was a quick read (read it in a day, in a few hours) and would highly recommend it if you need a quick read as a transition between two heavy books.An example is when Kenny’s mother in ‘Swiped Right’ speaks ill of Bella for being on Tinder but thinks that it is men being men when Kenny brings it up that his cousin must have been on Tinder to have met her there.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Her debut collection of stories, Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, became a runaway bestseller in Africa upon its release in 2021, and was named the bestselling fiction title of 2022 in Nigeria, with international editions following in the UK (Swift Press), US (HarperVia) and Germany (Peter Hammer Verlag). Life is too short to stifle laughter, and Kuku's masterpiece is guaranteed to tickle your funny bone like no other. In that case, I suppose the title of the book is the author making a play at publicity, which she clearly has achieved. From the story of a deceptive hookup girl to a woman who carries on wickedness from her teenage years into adulthood.Undoubtedly these characters represent some real life bad actors but the humor and sharp wit and downright absurdity of this collection raises it to four stars. Women in different chapters had to deal with objectification, oversexualization, condemnation, rape, second guessing of themselves. So, it is not surprising when a man dates a woman for years, treating her as his one and only, while being secretly married to a woman he respects enough to keep away from his concubine. The forever downtrodden and humiliated wives/girlfriends take their revenge and we hear about all kinds of horrible things the men do. The men in this book are liars, cheats, scammers, and largely undeserving of the women in their lives.

With these stories set within Lagos, the author employs a lot of complex sentences and overly sexual content to prove his point. Some were really enjoyable such as Catfish (messy as hell), Ode-Pus Complex (madness) and Cuck-Up (also mad).

Her keen eye for the idiosyncrasies of Lagosian culture, combined with his clever wordplay, ensures that every page delivers a punchline. Meeting him again must have brought back the memory of the seemingly pedophile act that closed her off to having anything to do with him as an adult.

Nearly All the Men in Lagos Are Mad underscores with wit, humour, wisdom and sensitivity, the perils of trying to find lasting love and companionship in Africa’s most notorious city. What may be underreported in other reviews of this book, is the tendency of the fairer species to make terrible decisions where matters of the heart are concerned. When I first started this book, I saw a review that criticized the author's use of 'Nigerian English' and I thought the person was, well, silly. The stories were easy to read but the sex scenes seemed forced to me and I found them unnecessary at some point.The gaslighting and painting of Caroline as the one with the fault just goes ahead to fall in line with the norm in the novel.