ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • “A taut and darkly funny contemporary noir that moves at lightning speed, it’s the wittiest and most fun murder party you’ve ever been invited to.” —MARIE CLAIRE Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit. Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

The room was mostly positive about Braithwaite's look at two sisters dealing with men and trauma in modern Lagos. What struck us most about the book was how dark it was. Korede is a terrific anti-hero as narrator. We talked a lot about how unreliable she was -- how she saw everyone around her as incompetent, how she did not recognize her own bad behavior in allowing a janitor to take the blame for her actions -- and how appropriate it was that she fails to take the chance to leave her family when she has the chance. What was most interesting about her unreliability was her culpability in her sister Ayooda's attacks. Essentially, the book is about the sister's response to the trauma of their father's physical abuse, and both sisters are basically trying to avoid being hurt by other men in two very different ways: Ayooda by attacking them before they can hurt her, and Korede by only attaching to hopeless or completely safe men (the doctor in her hospital Tade, the guy in the coma, Ayooda's dead lover). Of course, we also noticed that the book did not paint men well either. Despite Tade's kindness and intellect, he fails for Ayooda just for looks, and will not listen to Korede's warnings, reinforcing the idea that men are shallow and untrustworthy. Set in the casual corruption of Lagos, a setting we very much appreciated Braithwaite describing, the book is ultimately about how two sisters have bonded however uncomfortably against a dangerous and unstable world. We didn't see the humor in it that a lot of critics seemed to see, but we definitely thought that Braithwaite did a great if quite direct job of telling a cynical story of women surviving by protecting themselves.