“Open City” was actually Mr. Cole’s second novel. His first, “Every Day Is for the Thief,” was until now available only in Nigeria, where it was published in 2007. It, too, is a book of taut peregrinations. It, too, gives us a narrator who didn’t know who he was until he began to wander.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Mr. Cole’s novel has a mischievous title, taken from a Yoruba proverb: “Every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner.” It’s about a young Nigerian, also a psychiatry student in New York, who returns home to Lagos for a short visit. He moves through the city by bus, by car and on foot, filtering his observations about his former home through his filigreed observations about himself.

Thievery of various sorts percolates in his mind. He fears he has gone soft in America, that in Nigeria he will become prey. To survive in that country, he is viscerally reminded, there “has to be the will to be violent, a will that has to be available when it is called for.”

The official corruption in Nigeria astounds our unnamed narrator. Lawlessness is pandemic. “The barely concealed panic that taints so many interactions here is due precisely to the fact that nobody is in control, no one is ultimately responsible for anything at all.”

Some of the thievery he encounters, however, almost makes him smile. One of this novel’s best scenes is set in an Internet cafe in Lagos, where the narrator stumbles upon desperate men trying to scam wealthy foreigners in so-called advanced-fee frauds. Actually seeing these famous criminals in the flesh, he says, “I feel as though I have discovered the source of the Nile or the Niger.”