Black Sunday

Tola Rotimi Abraham’s first novel Black Sunday was published in 2020. It takes place in Lagos, Nigeria. Rotimi Abraham attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her previous fiction and nonfiction work has been published in Catapult, The Des Moines Register, and the Nigerian Literary Magazine, among others. She is originally from Lagos and therefore offers a truer experience of living in the city.

Lagos as a nation and society provides an important setting to this novel, which is structured in four parts, each of which has four chapters except the last which has two. The first chapter begins in 1996 and the last ends in 2015, allowing readers to understand how the characters grow and change over time. The narrative centers on four siblings—Bibike, Ariyike, Andrew, and Peter—as they deal with the departure of their parents and their quest for survival and success in Lagos.

This study guide refers to the 2020 edition published by Canongate Books Ltd.

Plot Summary

Black Sunday opens in 1996 on the first day that twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike have to get home from school on their own.