The Woman Who Fixed Molue Buses
A Novel of 1980s Lagos

About this book:

In the suffocating heat of 1984 Lagos, the yellow molue buses rule the roads—corroded, overloaded, held together by prayer and jury-rigged wire. Folasade Williams doesn't pray. She reads the engine's cough like a confession, diagnoses the governor's lock by ear, and files a steering pin from a dead Austin Morris to save a military contractor's tipper before sunset. At twenty-two, she's just claimed a bay in Alhaji Muri's repair pit, the first woman to turn a spanner under the Oshodi flyover, and her uncle is already selling her father's tools to scrap dealers.

But Sade didn't crawl out from under a Bedford 330 diesel to trade one master for another. With her father's Whitworth set locked in a trunk and the harmattan wind carrying ash across the Third Mainland Bridge, she enters a world where agberos collect tribute with clubs, drivers strike over fifty kobo, and a cracked gasket means seventy bodies in the lagoon. The mechanics here work by muscle and shortcut; Sade works by the book her father left her—the one that says metal doesn't lie, and geometry doesn't care who holds the wrench.

From the grease pits of Oshodi to the midnight sabotage on Carter Bridge, *The Woman Who Fixed Molue Buses* is a visceral, unforgettable debut: a novel about inheritance and invention, about a woman who refuses to be the exception that proves the rule, and about the machines that carry a city's beating heart—if you know how to listen.