Twenty Reasons

August 2026. A black truck leaves Agadez in the dark with five men on top of its cargo and one warning ringing in their ears: if you sleep, you fall off.

Adedayo Akinola has survived Kano, the bush crossing and three months of lies in Agadez. Now he must survive the Sahara itself. Thorn trees that open men's heads. A single tin cup shared by two hundred mouths. Soldiers who say "your money or I shoot you" and mean it. A breakdown at noon in a place with no shadow. And Madama, the last town in Niger, where a French fort stands ringed with landmines and people wait months for a truck that may never come.

Around him the road gathers its witnesses. Mercy, kidnapped twice and going home under a blue sign. Emeka, who buried four friends with a car jack. The women of Madama, who feed him, wash his shirt and send him away before five o'clock. And somewhere in a convoy of a hundred trucks, a girl with a scarf printed with small blue flowers, and the friend who is now paid to watch her.

At the line where Niger ends and Libya begins, the uniforms turn green, the guns turn on their own, and a soldier with a knife finds the one thing Dayo cannot explain: a list of mothers' names.

Built on published investigations and survivor testimony, Twenty Reasons is the second book of The Sand Road.

Every mother on that list is waiting by the phone.