Dead Dogs & Angels was a powerful novella that started off feeling like it was going to be a naive kind of tale where a young girl tries to find her way home but finished revealing a dark core. Everything was handled really well-I'll keep an eye out for her future books.

Lagos. A Nigerian and his British wife live with their young daughter. A robbery occurs. The young girl is taken by the robbers. A murder. The girl becomes lost. There are three voices used - the girl, the servant and the cook. Their stories tell of violence, racism, rape, child rape, magic, death and Other Important Events. A gritty novella of sadness and hope.

Dead Dogs and Angels by Mickela Sona is one of my first reads of the year, and it is stunning.

Yinka is a young girl living in Lagos with her parents. She experiences very disturbed sleep and often wakes up in unusual places, and this is where the novel begins. Yinka wakes up outside in the middle of the night, and discovers her family’s belongings in the back of a van. We are immediately thrown into a mystery, following brave little Yinka as she resolves to retrieve the items, particularly her father’s record player, his ‘Pride and Joy’. Yinka unknowingly enters a dangerous situation as she finds herself locked up and driven away in the back of the van by the two burglars. They take her out of the safety of the complex she lives in, and drive deep into the bush, which is filled with wild pigs, snakes and undesirable people. Here, Yinka will face one of the biggest challenges of her young life as she struggles to find her way home, to a family in turmoil over her disappearance.

The novel is like a spool of thread that slowly unravels with each chapter; Sona’s characters unpicking the tightly coiled narrative with their unique voices. As each person tells their story – Yinka’s parents; Yusuf, their servant; Maryam, their maid; Yinka herself – beginning from the night of Yinka’s disappearance and moving fluidly between the past and present, we are given insights, knowledge, understanding. Slowly, darker elements are revealed – sinister characters with a particular interest in children, guilt, disappointment, regret and loss. Yinka’s disappearance causes her parents, Jennifer and Thomas, to be wracked with guilt, but more so than a typical parent. They are tormented by memories of moments where they ignored Yinka, brushed her off, refused to spend time with her or pay her any attention. They long to return to these precious times, when they could have held their daughter close and bonded with her through touch, conversation, smiles and laughter. These revealing insights add complexity to their characters and allow the reader to feel both anger and empathy. Similarly, Maryam and Yusuf have their own secrets, and Sona is skilled at drip-feeding these to the reader, building suspense and tension.

Yinka herself is a stunning character. She is on the cusp of maturity, a young girl in a developing body that has both created a rift with her mother and attracted attention from older men. At the beginning of the novel, Yinka is naïve but is learning and changing, both physically and psychologically. Her journey through the wilderness, seeking the familiarity and security of the home from which she has been wrenched, is a fairy-tale-like coming of age, in which Yinka will begin to understand the complexities of adult life. Like the twins in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Yinka employs a stress on certain words and phrases uttered by her parents, through capitalisation – her father, for example, describes the other children in the complex to be ‘Not Of Her Calibre’. This consciously applied gravity is childlike, but reveals that Yinka understands more than adults give her credit for. Although she is at the centre of the novel, Yinka is the most isolated character. She inhabits two worlds: she is a child and a young woman; English and Lagosian; black and white. Her father forbids her from playing with other children on the complex in Lagos, and even her cousins mock and bully her. Her parents are distant and she has lost her beloved Mama, her paternal grandmother. Yusuf and Maryam are kind but their roles do not allow them the status of playmates. Kehinde, a neighbour, pays attention to Yinka in a way that is confusing and troubling. She is brutally lonely and lost. Storytelling plays a large role in the novel and in Yinka’s life; her coping mechanism as she trudges blindly through the bush is to reflect on memories and stories. Her father tells her stories, but they do not begin, as Yinka desires, with ‘once upon a time’ nor end with ‘happily ever after’; they are cautionary tales rooted in his culture and upbringing, and Yinka struggles to see herself within the words. Dog, who joins Yinka on her journey, is an enigmatic figure, possibly an invention to offer support and company, but he also embodies Yinka’s inner strength and the spirit of her grandmother. He is a companion, encouraging Yinka and providing a patient, listening ear as she mulls over her past and experiences, some of which are devastating revelations. She tells herself the stories that she wants, and needs, to hear.

Yinka’s identity as mixed race, both English and Lagosian, is explored within the novel as something that unsettles and isolates her. In a nod to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Yinka holds her mother’s beauty in high esteem. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, Jennifer is the ideal woman and Yinka will never compare – she does not even feel that her parents find her beautiful or endearing. Yinka muses on a dream she often has, where she swaps her ordinary brown eyes with her mother’s piercing blue ones, leaving her eyes the dressing table. This is such a heart-breaking moment, which is intensified by other instances of racism and fractured identity that fall like blows on Yinka’s young heart – there is a particularly tough scene where Yinka is getting her hair cut at an English hairdresser, and is openly laughed at and derided by the staff who view their derogatory comments and othering of the little girl as an innocent joke. As the destructive, demoralising influences on young Yinka’s life stack up, it is clear to appreciate why she is so lost – the wilderness of the bush is simply a personification of her emotional state.

Dead Dogs and Angels is a devastatingly beautiful novel, filled with complicated characters and secrets. It culminates in a poignant ending, which does not offer the hope and happiness the reader has wished for. Yinka is a figure that will remain in my mind for a long time, and will surely have an impact on any reader. This is a novel about childhood, family and, above all, loss. It is affecting, heart-breaking and utterly unique.

Don’t let either the cover or the title put you off this novella, published on 25 January by the independent press, Holland House Books. I nearly did. Who wants to read about dead dogs?

This debut from the very talented Mickela Sonola is a seemingly naïve tale about a ten year old dual heritage girl, Yinka growing up bored and lonely in Lagos, Nigeria. Her parents don’t have much time for her so she turns to one of the house servants who gives her sweets, money and attention. But, when she finds herself unwilling witness to a burglary and is accidentally kidnapped, Yinka has to rely on all her limited resources to find her way back home from the bush. As an unreliable narrator her voice is very effective although occasionally slips into being over-naïve (I was really not keen on the use of Capital Letters to signal Powerful Words in her life); but interspersed with viewpoints from other characters in the story, it all builds up to a powerful short novel with a shockingly dark heart. What begins as the story of a child’s attempt to get home turns into an examination of the way some men groom and abuse vulnerable girls and young women.

Mickela Sonola uses Nigerian tales and magical realism to elevate Yinka’s story to one that stresses the vital importance of telling stories and the development of the imagination to make sense of the world. The language used is often very beautiful: ‘Darkness was pouring into the sky now. The red light drained into the horizon, leaving behind a blanket of black, pin-pricked with stars.’ But Sonola also uses it for more sinister effects: ‘The sharp glint of a knife appeared against his throat and there was a sprinkling like raindrops splattering pitter-patter, on the leaves around her, on the ground, on her skin.’

This is a stunning debut with a strong voice, comparable to the poignant child’s voice of Leon in Kit de Waal’s best seller, ‘My Name is Leon’. I look forward to reading Mickela Sonola’s second novel.