Nigeria, March 25 -- Labour is the crowning test of misery for the unnamed girl at the beginning of Olatunji Ololade's Of gods and their claytoys. For the teenager, birth pangs arrive as a banishment and a reckoning. She moves through the night, distressed, her mind retreating into the imagined embrace of a home that no longer exists.

"Labour pangs swirled buoyant imagery of the parents she hardly knew in her head; lucid portraits of her mother's splendid beauty, her father's gracious strength and their cosy homestead amid the hills. But that was merely a retreat.At that point, she would have parted her thighs to a butcher's jackknife as long as it rid her of her burden."

Here, Olatunji Ololade sets the stage for a novel that hardly rom...