The Road to the Salt Sea

<p><strong>WINNER OF THE 2025 WHITING AWARD FOR FICTION</strong></p><p><strong>PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FINALIST • ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE LONGLIST</strong></p><p><strong>As wrenching and luminous as Omar El Akkad’s <em>What Strange Paradise</em> and Mohsin Hamid’s <em>Exit West,</em> a searing exploration of the global migration crisis that moves from Nigeria to Libya to Italy, from an exciting new literary voice.</strong></p><p>Able God works for low pay at a four-star hotel where he must flash his “toothpaste-white smile” for wealthy guests. When not tending to the hotel’s overprivileged clientele, he muses over self-help books and draws life lessons from the game of chess.</p><p>But Able’s ordinary life is upended when an early morning room service order leads him to interfere with Akudo, a sex worker involved with a powerful but dangerous hotel guest. Suddenly caught in a web of violence, guilt, and fear, Able must run to save himself—a journey that takes him into the desert with a group of drug-addled migrants, headed by a charismatic religious leader calling himself Ben Ten. The travelers’ dream of reaching Europe—and a new life—is shattered when they fall prey to human traffickers, suffer starvation, and find themselves on the precipice of death, fighting for their lives and their freedom.</p><p>As Able God moves into the treacherous unknown, his consciousness becomes focused on survival and the foundations of his beliefs—his ideas about betterment and salvation—are forever altered. Suspenseful, incisive, and illuminating, <em>The Road to the Salt Sea</em> is a story of family, fate, religion, survival, the failures of the Nigerian class system, and what often happens to those who seek their fortunes elsewhere.</p>