A year after their best friend, Janet Uzor dies in a drowning incident, Pamela and Ebere are trying to cope and move on in their own unique ways. Pamela buries her emotions, while Ebere has been on a mission to find out what really happened to their friend, an excellent swimmer, whose death seems unfair and unconscionable.

People Live Here tells of Kanulia, a 25-year-old single mother, whose quest for a better job that will help her raise her son in the post-PMS subsidy removal crises of January 2012 lands her a foreign-aid nursing work in Sana’a in the aftermath of the Yemeni Uprising, the previous year. With the cast of eccentric yet friendly coworkers from all over the world, she eases into the old city and takes in the architecture. She begins a journey of friendship, trauma and rediscovery that will bring her back to Nigeria a changed woman, even though she is initially unaware of it, it’s a change that will save lives at the crisis-stricken Northern borders of her country.

In Adoria, a small village, a farmer lives a half existence, nameless and waiting for death when a knock on his door changes his life forever. Salem, the girl with a past just as dark as his own slowly renews his will to live. Through her eyes, he sees the world anew, a land filled with possibility and adventure.

Born in war-torn Liberia, Ma Kemah George has had a series of bad luck in the course of her young life. Among other troubles, she was molested as a child and the only thing that got her through her childhood sane was her best friend, Vincent, who later became her fiancé. Then he died a month after their engagement, and she had to start the next chapter of her life alone as an international student in New York. Her plan was simple. Get over her dead fiancé while getting a master’s degree in the USA. But during her first thirty minutes in the land of the free, she supposedly became engaged to America’s beloved baseball star, Warren McAllister. Now Twitter is going crazy with #whoisMaKemah?

Remi Coker and Nnamdi Okonkwo leave the shores of Nigeria full of hope in search of greener pastures in London. Remi from the prestigious Coker family is expected to return home after her law degree to run the family law firm and Nnamdi, frustrated by the federal university strikes plans to escape Nigeria and never return.

In “A Private Experience”, a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she’s been pushing away. In “Tomorrow is Too Far”, a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother’s death. The young mother at the centre of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband is back in Lagos and has moved his mistress into their home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.

Two boys venture into a nearby forest, to hunt for bats and cook their prey over an open fire. Within a month, they are dead, bodies ravaged by an insidious disease. Compounding the family’s grief, experts warn against touching the sick. But this caution comes too late: the virus spreads rapidly.

In a series of moving snapshots, Véronique Tadjo illustrates the terrible extent of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014, through the eyes of those affected in myriad ways: the doctor who tirelessly treats patients day after day in a sweltering tent; the student who volunteers to work as a gravedigger while universities are closed; the grandmother who agrees to take in an orphaned boy cast out of his village. And watching over them all is the ancient and wise Baobab tree, mourning the dire state of the earth yet providing a sense of hope for the future.

Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends in his neighborhood. They discover Lagos together as teenagers whose differing ideologies come to the fore over everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to God, sex to politics. They remain close-knit until Ihechi’s girlfriend, is killed in an anti-government riot.

Exiled by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle’s family, where he struggles to find himself outside his former circle of friends. Ihechi eventually finds success by leveraging his connection with a notorious prostitution linchpin and political heavyweight, and earning favor among the ruling elite.

But just as Ihechi is about to make his final ascent into the elite political class, he encounters his childhood friends and experiences a crisis of conscience that forces him to question his motives and who he wants to be.

A collection of twelve short stories.