The Lies we Tell by Bala, Fatima

Some lies protect us. Some lies destroy us. Most lies do both.

The Lies We Tell is a fierce, dazzling, heartbreaking collection of stories set across the motor parks, matrimonial bedrooms, and candlelit hostels of Northern Nigeria. From the dye pits of Zaria to the rooftops of Abuja, Fatima Bala pulls back the curtain on the secret architecture of Hausa women’s lives, the bargains made in silence, the truths swallowed whole, the love offered and withheld and weaponised across generations. Spirits move through these pages alongside pharmacists and politicians. Grandmothers whisper to unseen things. Girls become women and women become ghosts, and some, only some, find their way back.

Written in a voice that crackles with wit, grief, and an almost unbearable tenderness, these stories ask the question no proverb has ever answered: when the lie is the only thing holding everything together, is it still wrong to tell it?