By Leonora Ifeanyichukwu
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
—Warsan Shire, Home
There are books that entertain, and then there are books that demand something of you, your attention, your emotion, your conscience. The Road to Salt Sea, the debut novel by Kolawole Samuel, is firmly in the latter category. It is not just a novel; it is a reckoning. A slow burn of truth wrapped in fiction, it charts a migrant’s desperate journey across the Sahara Desert in search of dignity, freedom, and the fragile illusion of peace across saltwater.
In The Road to Salt Sea, Samuel doesn’t flinch. He writes with both the urgency of a witness and the lyricism of a poet, offering a deeply human exploration of migration, survival, and what it means to dream when the world offers you nothing but despair. His is not a voice seeking applause, but understanding and his prose echoes long after the final page.
At the heart of this powerful narrative is AbleGod, a university graduate barely surviving in Lagos, stuck in a dead-end hotel job where he grins for tips while suffocating on unfulfilled dreams. He reads self-help books like scripture, plays chess to stay sane, and like many young men in his orbit, flirts with the edge, numbing the emptiness with weed and football.
But everything changes after a charged and dangerous encounter with Akudo, a sex worker linked to a dangerous guest. One moment of truth, one flash of violence, and AbleGod’s life is thrown into chaos. Alongside two equally desperate companions, he flees. Their destination? The shimmering mirage of Europe, a place they have never seen, but believe might offer salvation. Their path? The unrelenting, soul-crushing dunes of the Sahara.
What follows is a journey both physical and existential, an odyssey littered with trauma, silence, betrayal, and fleeting grace.
Kolawole’s prose is deceptively plain, but beneath its quiet surface is music. A rhythm. A weight. His style is cinematic without being flashy, emotionally heavy without being melodramatic. He builds scenes like a painter, each sentence a brushstroke across the canvas of the Sahara. The desert becomes more than a backdrop; it is a living, breathing metaphor for loss, loneliness, and the slow erosion of hope.
What truly sets The Road to Salt Sea apart is its psychological depth. This is no sanitized tale of migration. Samuel peels back the flesh to reveal the sinew of trauma, the ghosts of childhood, the ache of unrealized potential. AbleGod is no perfect protagonist, he’s flawed, impulsive, burdened by guilt and grief. And yet, it is in his imperfections that we see ourselves. He is painfully real, and that reality is what grips the reader by the throat.
Surrounding him is a chorus of unforgettable characters:
—Morufu, limping but determined, chasing football dreams to escape poverty.
—Ben Ten, a street philosopher and charismatic schemer who speaks in parables and moves people with the hope of a “promised land.”
—And a nameless underage boy, silent as a ghost, whose presence lingers like a scar.
Each character bleeds humanity. Each is a vessel for pain, longing, and the slow erosion of innocence. Samuel gives them dignity, even in their lowest moments.
This is fiction tethered to journalism—rooted in real-world stories, names changed, but truths intact. Samuel has done his research, and it shows. He does not write from a safe distance. He writes as though he’s walked beside his characters, tasted their dust, felt their hunger. It is immersive, intimate, and deeply unsettling.
But within this bleak landscape, there is also grace. There is laughter, even if brief. There is resilience. There is the will to live, even when living feels impossible. The novel’s emotional climax does not come in the form of grand triumph, but in the quiet, stubborn act of survival.
In the end, The Road to Salt Sea is not just a migration story. It is a profound meditation on humanity—its brutality, its tenderness, its desperate hunger for meaning. It echoes Nietzsche’s famous line: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
And indeed, these characters bear much. But they carry us with them. We sob at 3 a.m. We rage. We hope. We remember.
Kolawole Samuel, with this debut, has declared himself a major force in contemporary African literature. The Road to Salt Sea has already made waves, earning him the 2025 Whiting Award in Fiction and shortlistings for the PEN/Hemingway Award and International Book Award. His work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, and The Hopkins Review. A teacher of fiction and African literature at Penn State University, Kolawole is also the founder of Writers’ Studio, Nigeria’s pioneering creative writing school.
Book Details:
Publisher: Masobe Books
Language: English
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Page Count: 310
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Verdict:
The Road to Salt Sea is not a comfort read, but it is a necessary one. It deserves a place not just on our shelves, but in our schools, our conversations, and our collective memory. With time, and rightly so, it will be hailed as a modern classic.