The Sand Road

January 2026. In Akure, a market woman sells the stall that has fed her family for thirty years, so that her son can reach Europe. "Libya is just the bus stop," they say in the churchyard. "Italy is the house."

Adedayo Akinola is twenty-seven, an electrician in a town where nobody is building anymore. He hides his mother's money in Milo sachets and at the bottom of a sack of garri, and follows the instructions of a man he knows only as a warm voice on the phone.

In Kano he learns that even sleep has a price. On a motorcycle in the dark, he crosses a border he never sees. In a minibus built for chickens, he learns exactly what his life is worth. And in Agadez, the ancient caravan city on the edge of the Sahara, he learns the cruellest lesson of the road: the waiting is not a mistake. The waiting is the business.

Around him are others the road has claimed. A sixteen-year-old from Benin City, bound by an oath sworn over a chicken heart. A girl from Ikorodu who dreams of opening a hair salon in Italy. A woman whose family has already held her funeral. A desert driver who keeps a notebook of the dead.

Built from published investigations and survivor testimony, The Sand Road is fiction, but the road is real. Book One ends where the desert begins, on top of a truck at night, where one warning matters more than any other.