The City Will Love You

Enticing, masterful and compelling, The City Will Love You is a collection of short stories from talented wordsmith, Nii Ayikwei Parkes. From Lagos to London, this collection moves across the globe to focus on the personalities that the city ignores every day, the ones it really loves.

I believe that a move from countryside to city is more gut-wrenching than movement between countries. A woman from Lagos instinctively knows how to survive New York – city sensors kick in and she's soon alive to the music, the charm, the danger, the possibilities.

The stories in The City Will Love You can only happen in a bustling city environment. In ‘Socks Ball’ a group of football-obsessed boys grapple with coming of age in Accra, robbed of the certainties of youth and imprisoned by an imposed language. A young Kenyan man takes revenge on racist London neighbours in ‘Scotch Bonnets’. Tap dance, distilled via Nicholas Brothers videos on Betamax, becomes a means to escape hunger during the 1983 Sahel drought in ‘The First Shampoo Hair Show’. In ‘The Orange Story’ a filmmaker roots the beginnings of her craft. A well-educated Ghanaian migrant in South London wrestles with the decision to tell his police girlfriend that his papers are false in ‘When We Were We’. ‘Whatever Song the Drum’ explores the dilemma of a young lawyer in Abidjan called upon to defend a gay classmate.

In ‘Momentum’ a street porter plans to use her knowledge of physics to pre-emptively protect her younger sister from a rapist. ‘Wood’ recounts the unexpected return of an uncle presumed dead in Monrovia during the Liberian civil war. In ‘Karl's Gold’ a family secret haunts a young woman on the verge of sexual discovery; ‘Letters to the President’ traces an elaborate plot by a West African president to reset his country's economy, and ‘La Bodega’ explores African students' experience of racism in 1990s Toulouse.

Wherever it is, and wherever we are, the city is indifferent to us. And yet, because we want to be important and don't want to disappear, cities make us behave in ways that can reveal new dimensions of ourselves, and that is the heart of this collection of stories.

The book’s cover will be designed by Inua Ellams.