The Weight of Agbada

Everyone in this story is carrying more than their cloth can hide.

Ada Okafor has spent eight years building the perfect armour at Meridian Trust — until a new director from London looks at her work and sees something no one else ever bothered to see: a mind, not a rumour. What starts as one clean, dangerous moment of being understood becomes the most expensive thing either of them has ever wanted.

Around them, a whole street breathes and lies and survives: a beer-parlour woman fighting to reclaim a stolen piece of herself, a landlord drowning quietly behind eleven agbadas, a reformed enforcer discovering the one thing he can't walk away from, and a city closing in from every side — office gossip, cult violence, and a land grab that could take the ground out from under all of them at once.

The Weight of Agbada is a Lagos ensemble novel about the costume everyone wears to survive, and what it costs to finally set it down. Slow-burn romance, high-stakes drama, and a city rendered in its full, unsparing detail — for anyone who wants their fiction to ache a little before it heals.