Lagos’s literary and business worlds converged last week at the Radisson Blu Anchorage in Victoria Island for the public presentation of The Challengers, the new narrative nonfiction work by novelist and physician Dr. Eghosa Imasuen, cofounder of Narrative LandscapePress and best known for Fine Boys.

Published by Narrative Landscape Press, the book trades the conventions of the standard corporate biography for a tightly plotted, character-driven account of how a group of young Nigerians — Nonso Okpala, Adeniyi Adenubi, Mobolaji Adewumi, Gbenga Omolokun, and Azubike Emodi among them — built the VFD Group out of the wreckage of the 2008 global financial crisis. For a writer whose reputation rests on fiction, it’s a striking pivot into reportage, and an early sign that Nigerian narrative nonfiction is finding its footing as a genre worth watching.

What distinguishes The Challengers from the shelf of founder memoirs it might otherwise resemble is its refusal of the lone-genius myth. Imasuen spent close to five years reporting the book, working through archives and interviews to reconstruct not a single visionary’s rise but a study in collective ownership, governance, and trust among equal partners . The book carries a foreword from former President Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who described it as documenting “the birth of something truly transformative.” Its launch featured a live conversation between Imasuen, the VFD founders, and media entrepreneur Chude Jideonwo, alongside a review from Channels Book Club host Kunle Kasumu, who praised the book’s literary craft as much as its business lessons.

For a literary community increasingly interested in nonfiction that borrows fiction’s tools, Kasumu’s review leaned specifically on the book’s dramatic architecture, its characters, and its pacing, treating it less as a case study than as a genuinely engineered narrative. Beyond the launch itself, the evening’s most consequential announcement may be The Challengers Library Endowment, an initiative to place 3,000 copies of the book in public university libraries and directly into the hands of young entrepreneurs across Nigeria!

The Challengers is now available in bookstores nationwide and on Amazon, with further details on the book and the Library Endowment available at narrativelandscape.com.

See Pictures from the launch below: