“Born on a Tuesday” begins in 2003, during the uneasy truce that followed. Dantala, the novel’s narrator, is one of a gang of street boys who sleep under a kuka tree in Bayan Layi, a small northwestern Nigerian town. They steal sweet potatoes, smoke Nigerian grass (called “wee-wee”), brag about their exploits and get into fights. Dantala used to go to Quranic school, sent there by his father, until he drifted away. He’s the smallest boy in the gang and the swiftest runner. He doesn’t know how old he is, but says he has fasted for Ramadan “nearly 10 times.”

During the elections, the boys are paid to cause trouble by the Small Party. They’ve been promised a shelter “for us homeless boys and those who can’t return home or don’t have parents, where we can learn things like making chairs and sewing caftans.” When they attack the offices of the victorious Big Party, Dantala holds the matches while another boy pours the gasoline. A fat man runs out of the building, and Dantala strikes him with a machete. He is already dead when they set him on fire. By now, the police are shooting into the crowd, and Dantala’s friend Banda, the leader of his gang, is killed.

Dantala runs until he can no longer hear the guns, then hitches a ride in the back of a truck and eventually makes his way to a big nearby town, where he is taken in at a mosque that offers free food, a place to sleep and the comfort of communal worship. “Praying in congregation makes us equal before Allah,” he remembers a former teacher telling him.

Safe in the embrace of a generous Islam, Dantala exchanges the rough violence of his childhood for more adolescent musings: “Camels look sleepy to me, like they are being forced to do everything when they are tired.” “A bra is an interesting piece of clothing. I wonder who came up with the complicated idea.” Modest, clever and discreet, Dantala gains the trust of the local imam. He teaches himself English and learns to love books. But this sunny interlude is already turning dark.

On a visit home, Dantala has learned that his widowed mother is now mute; her other sons have been sent away to Quranic school; her two daughters, twins, have died in a flood. Only her sister-in-law, abandoned by her husband, who has taken a second wife, is willing to care for her, feeding her “like a little baby.”