I Do Not Come to You by Chance

Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy tries to win girl back by getting rich as an email scammer.

That’s the plot of I Do Not Come to You by Chance, a 400-page first novel by the Nigerian author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, published last year by Hyperion.

It’s fast-reading pop fiction with few literary pretensions—much lighter than recent fiction by Abani, Chimamanda, Habila, or Oyeyemi, not to mention elders like Achebe and Soyinka. But it’s smart and absorbing, and Nwaubani throws off some nice turns of phrase. Here is the meeting of the hero’s parents, told in a prologue:

As soon as Augustina caught that first glimpse of him, she decided that even if Engineer’s steps had not been leading to their courtyard, she would have crawled over broken glass, swum across seven oceans, and climbed seven mountains to see him that day. He was as handsome as paint.

For a glimpse inside modern Nigeria as experienced by a bright and ambitious teenager—from bring-your-own-IV hospitals to the lurid lifestyle of the “419” con artists—I Do Not Come to You by Chance is well worth reading.