On Lagos as a character, not a backdrop

Every city in fiction is a choice. You can make it a setting, a container for the story, a place where things happen. Or you can make it a presence, something that has opinions, that pushes back, that changes the people moving through it.

Lagos is not a backdrop. Anyone who has spent time there knows this. The city is too insistent, too loud, too alive to sit quietly in the background while your characters get on with their business.

When I started writing The Agency, I made a deliberate decision: Lagos would have its own point of view. Not a narrator, not a chapter heading, but a weight in every scene that reminded the reader they were somewhere particular. Somewhere that had its own rules, its own rhythms, its own way of refusing to let anyone pass through unchanged.

That meant paying attention to the specifics. Not just traffic, but which road. Not just heat, but the particular quality of heat at four in the afternoon when the generator has been running for six hours. Not just noise, but the specific layering of sounds that tells you exactly where in the city you are.

The result, I hope, is a Lagos that readers who know it will recognise, and readers who do not will feel they have visited by the time they finish the book.