Many are mad, but few are roaming. It is a phrase usually deployed as mockery, aimed at the men and women who wander the streets visibly undone. But what if the joke has always been on us? That is the provocation at the heart of Few Are Roaming, a debut short story anthology from Kokonut Head Media that refuses the comfortable distance between the observer and the observed.

The collection brings together fifteen stories that interrogate the archetype of the madman in African fiction, moving across love stories gone wrong, the tensions of everyday market life, and bold ventures into Afrofuturism and fantasy. The anthology does not treat madness as spectacle or metaphor, it treats it as a condition baked into the structures of Nigerian life: the home, the relationship, the culture, the country. In these pages, madness and anger become sisters, reflecting what it means to live, love, and lose one’s footing in a world where the quietly unhinged outnumber those who roam.

The three writers behind the collection — Damilola Omotoyinbo, Chidera Udochukwu, and Roseline Mgbodichinma — are emerging voices who came up through Kokonut Head Media’s Writers in Residence programme, and each carries a remarkable trail of prizes and publications behind them. Omotoyinbo, whose work has appeared in POETRY Magazine and Prairie Schooner, recently received a fully-funded MFA admission and the 2026 DC Stanfa Memorial Writers’ Award. Udochukwu, a pharmacist and writer of Igbo descent, has racked up fiction prizes across the continent. Mgbodichinma, a law student and contributing fiction editor at barren Magazine, writes with particular devotion to women’s stories.

Few Are Roaming is available for pre-order now from Nigeria via Kokonut Head Media’s online store, and from the US via their website.