One of Nigeria’s most decorated literary voices has a new book on the way, and the anticipation is already palpable! Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, author of Season of Crimson Blossoms, which won the $100,000 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2016 (Read his acceptance speech here), and When We Were Fireflies, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award in 2024, has announced his third novel, Damage, due in bookstores on September 11, 2026, published by Masobe Books. The announcement, made quietly on social media with the words “the cat is out of the Bagco now,” sent readers into an immediate frenzy, with fans noting that an Ibrahim-Masobe pairing guarantees an unputdownable read.

Damage is a sweeping story set against one of the most charged moments in Nigerian political history. When Nasrin Amin casts her first vote on June 12, 1993 — that date, that election, that wound — she believes she is stepping into a new dawn for both her country and her heart. Decades later, the scars of one brutal night return to haunt her and her three children: Mustapha, the rational dreamer; Suraj, the hot-headed soldier-in-waiting; and Zubaida, the sharp-eyed chronicler of family secrets. At the centre of the reckoning stands Colonel Jarumai, a man who embodies both Nigeria’s capacity for violence and the deepest wound in Nasrin’s past.

The novel moves between the euphoric promise of democracy and the suffocating grip of military dictatorship, a terrain Ibrahim knows intimately, both as a storyteller rooted in the North and as a journalist whose reporting on conflict and trauma has won him the Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling from the International Center for Journalists, for his Granta piece “All That Was Familiar.” Damage asks what justice looks like when silence has already stolen so much, a question that feels inseparable from Ibrahim’s broader literary project, which has always probed the cost of what is left unspoken in Nigerian families and in the Nigerian state.

Ibrahim is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and was included in the Hay Festival’s Africa39 anthology of the most promising sub-Saharan African writers under 40. His debut short story collection The Whispering Trees was shortlisted for the Caine Prize, and Season of Crimson Blossoms has since been translated into French, German, and Tamil, with its French translation shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina Étranger. With Damage, his fifth book overall, Ibrahim arrives at what may be his most ambitious work yet, a multigenerational reckoning with love, memory, and the long, unfinished business of Nigeria’s political trauma. September 11 cannot come soon enough.

Read the synopsis below:

A sweeping story of love, betrayal, and the long shadows of Nigeria’s turbulent past.
When Nasrin Amin casts her first vote on June 12, 1993, she believes a new dawn is breaking for her country and for her heart. But decades later, the scars of one brutal night return to haunt her and her children. Mustapha, the rational dreamer; Suraj, the hot-headed soldier-in-waiting; and Zubaida, the sharp-eyed chronicler of family secrets, are all drawn into a dangerous reckoning with the man who embodies both their nation’s brutality and their mother’s deepest wound.
Colonel Jarumai has spent his life burying memories of what he has done. For Nasrin, silence has been survival. But when her sons plot vengeance and her daughter demands truth, the past can no longer stay buried.
Spanning the euphoric promise of democracy to the suffocating grip of dictatorship, Damage asks what justice looks like when silence has already stolen so much. It is a story about the cost of memory, the inheritance of pain, and the fragile hope that love might endure even after everything else is broken.