THE ROAD TO THE SALT SEA

A young Nigerian man’s effort to escape his country provokes a series of moral compromises.

Kolawole’s debut novel opens like a thriller: Able God, the protagonist, is nursing a badly wounded hand; he’s desperately trying to reach a couple of people on his phone and is in a rush to get out of town. Soon the story backtracks into an explanation: Able God is a bright young man whose university degree has earned him only a low-level job delivering room service at a pricey hotel. There, he witnesses the aftermath of a man violently abusing a prostitute; not long after, the two men tussle, leading Able God to kill the other with a shard of glass. He can argue self-defense, but the police likely won’t take his side and the prisons are unspeakable, so he acts on a man’s proposal that he start a new life in Europe. The pitch is suspicious—he doesn’t have to pay any money upfront?—but lacking options, he hops aboard a bus headed north. From there, Kolawole’s narrative goes relatively slack, following Able God’s point-by-point trek across the Sahara, stopping at way stations in Niger, Libya, and Italy that make his decision feel all the more ill-advised; his dream of living in Europe as a professional chess player, unlikely to begin with, seems increasingly tragicomic. But if Kolawole’s narrative is straightforwardly linear, its portrait of moral degradation is memorable, as Able God is forced to abandon his virtues one by one for the sake of survival. Kolawole sometimes puts unnecessary stress on the ironies and horrors of his hero’s predicament—“Able God found the logic of the operation impeccable but also evil”—but Able God is never reduced to a type. He’s one of countless refugees seeking a new life, but his trials are singular and harrowing.

A bracing, well-paced story of migrant desperation.