FAKE ACCOUNTS LIGHTSEEKERS

Lauren Oyler is a young American writer who made her name as a spiky critic trading in eye-rolling takedowns of literary darlings from Sally Rooney to Kristen ‘Cat Person’ Roupenian.

So, naturally, the knives are out for her debut, a Twitter-era satire that – just as predictably – is so witheringly ironic as to be practically armour-plated against critique.

Modishly autofictional in tone but with a curveball plot, it centres on an Oyler-like writer who quits Brooklyn for Berlin after discovering her lover is an online conspiracy theorist. Yet while the relentlessly deadpan observational comedy serves to redeem a sagging storyline, the novel ultimately feels like a symptom of the culture Oyler is sending up, not the remedy.

Kayode’s debut is a great big wedge of a novel. It’s focused on a Nigerian psychologist, Philip Taiwo, just returned from working in America, who travels to a remote southern Nigeria border town to try to uncover the truth about the murder of three university students accused of stealing from the town’s youth.

The undergraduates were beaten and then burned alive – but few of the town’s residents, including the obstructive local cops, seem keen to find out why they were murdered.

This would be a standard procedural crime novel were it not for the occasionally spectacular but more regularly depressing background of contemporary Nigeria. Taiwo’s acute sense of place often overshadows his occasionally clunky writing but this new series has promise.