Lagos Will Be Hard For You

by Ayotola Tehingbola

An almost-blind mother pawns her daughter off to save her. A grieving son must bury his Muslim father in twenty-four hours in the thick of winter. A doctor battles to save her partner from himself. Desperation makes a young businesswoman seek out a spiritual experience. A dominatrix wants to give life to her sexual kinks in her repressive household. The weight of the word "slave" is put to the test during a first date in conservative Idaho. A boy escapes his bipolar mother.

These stories and more are an excavation of what it means to exist at the crossroads of desire, ambition, and tradition. Tehingbola explores the indelible erasure of personhood when one tries to fit into the hard places where injustice reigns. She fillets the flesh as these characters try to exercise autonomy in their worlds and swim against the uncontrollable tides that mould their lives.

Hardcover

Published May 14, 2026

About the author

Ayotola Tehingbola (she/her, b. ’93) is a lawyer and artist from Lagos, Nigeria.

Her debut story collection, LAGOS WILL BE HARD FOR YOU, was shortlisted for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, and is published by Masobe Books (West Africa, 2025) and Jacaranda Books (UK/Commonwealth, 2026).

Her work has appeared in The Common, CRAFT, Witness Magazine, Washington Square Review, etc., and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She was also selected for the 2025 Best Small Fictions anthology. She has received fellowships and support from the Alexa Rose Foundation, Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, and the Key West Literary Seminar.

Reviews

[Sage Abena Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many good stories, some linked.I liked it

[Oluwadamilola Oladele · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a collection of wonderful stories.
Quite sad though and ruined my mood many times. But again, wonderful stories.

[Tolu Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ayotola Tehingbola’s Lagos Will Be Hard for You, a short story collection, published in the UK by Jacaranda Books (2026) and in Nigeria by Masobe Books (2025), begins with a death that refuses to stay contained. In “abba father,” the opening story of the collection, Ibrahim Mohammed learns, by way of a curt text message, that his father has died in a butcher shop, slumped over a table of goat innards. The scene is at once visceral and oddly procedural, a body already slipping from intimacy into administration. What follows is a logistical crisis: a son, long estranged from the terms of his inheritance, must arrange an Islamic burial within twenty-four hours in a landscape that does not recognize the urgency of such rites. The story unfolds as a series of collisions: religion meets bureaucracy;  memory meets habit;  language itself falters. Ibrahim, who has spent decades smoothing himself into the expectations of American life, discovers that he cannot adequately explain why his father must be buried, why cremation is impossible, why time matters. The rituals remain, but their meanings have thinned. He performs belief without possessing it.

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