There are cities and then there are megacities. The most prosaic definition of a megacity is one that has more than 10 million inhabitants. Lahore makes it. London doesn’t. This figure, however, is fairly arbitrary. The cutoff was once eight million. And who knows, with the rate of human multiplication, we might in future have to raise the bar to 15 million.

Whatever the number, Lagos will always qualify. I grew up in this megacity to end all megacities. By the time I finish typing this sentence, the entire population of Macclesfield will have arrived in Lagos and been absorbed without a trace.



Yet I don’t think of these places solely as mathematical phenomena. The key to the concept is in the prefix. A mega expression of life, where humanity is condensed into a few square miles and the force and friction of all this jostling generates creativity and destruction in equal measure. Life, death, comedy, tragedy, joy and sorrow are all heightened in megacities.



Knowing all this, how did I dare to write a novel called Welcome to Lagos? How could I capture the essence of Africa’s largest city in 350 pages? I assembled a large cast of characters, I set them on the city boundaries and then I said: “Go forth into Lagos and live it.” Did I succeed? Well, you tell me. These are my top 10 megacities in fiction.



1. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

From an early scene, when a cask of wine breaks open in a Parisian slum and bystanders rush to drink every last drop, it is clear that we’re in megacity territory. The accuracy of Dickens’s pre-revolution Paris may be held up for scrutiny but never its intensity. As for his depiction of London, Dickens almost single-handedly created the image of Victorian London that we carry still today. Few writers have ever been so powerful. It was the best of times for fiction.

2. The Bees by Laline Paull

The hive is often used as a metaphor for the large city but Paull’s novel makes it literal. We follow Flora 717, the lowest class of bee, as she rises through the hive and has all the possible and impossible adventures you could hope to fit into a bee’s life.

3. Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

This is the quintessential megacity novel. Four Malaysians move to Shanghai and try to make it big. Busy with bling, hustle and fake designer bags, it’s written in a clear, simple prose set at contrast with the razzle it describes. Under all this sparkle is the loneliness of a city where a million people live a million separate lives.

4. The Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis

The protagonists in this childhood favourite are travelling for most of the novel, but for a brief interlude they are in Tashbaan, where the plot starts to fizz. From afar, this fantastical city is “one of the wonders of the world”. Inside, however, are “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions, and the piles of refuse which lay everywhere”. An accurate description of many megacities I’ve passed through.

5. Saturday by Ian McEwan

One day in the life of central London, including diverted traffic, brain surgery and armed robbery. If you wonder how 24 hours in one man’s life could be so eventful, you must live in the suburbs. Henry Perowne, neurosurgeon, is an intelligent mind wandering through the British capital, and there is little he doesn’t pause to ponder on: from the BT Tower, to squash, to the war in Iraq. One of my favourite state-of-the-nation novels.

Lagos without the colour … a still from The Dark Night: Batman (2008) directed By Christopher Nolan. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

6. The Carnivorous City by Toni Kan

This list would be incomplete without a Lagos novel and they don’t get much sharper and slicker than this. Abel, a lecturer in the small town of Asaba, discovers that his younger brother Soni, a big man in Lagos, has gone missing. He travels to the city to unravel the mystery and gets sucked into a high-society world of big money, big crime and big secrets. I read this in one sitting.



7. Batman, DC Comics

Gotham is Lagos without the colour, the joy, the energy. Never was a grimmer more miserable place imagined and for this grim place an equally joyless superhero, skulking through the city in tight hosiery and a pointy-eared mask. If Lagos had a superhero, she would be called Jollof Woman, riding a danfo, dressed in orange and busy redeeming criminals with the healing power of jollof rice.

8. Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai

This novel is set in old Delhi, in a crumbling family house in retreat from the louder, newer city outside. Every family has its own personal version of a national crisis and this is the Das family’s Partition story. Novels are not history books but there’s an emotional accuracy in this novel that shows how cities and countries can split over religious and cultural differences.

9. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

A miniaturist is murdered in 16th-century Istanbul. Whodunnit is secondary in this kaleidoscope of a novel. We move through the city with a catalogue of unexpected narrators: a coin, a corpse, the colour red. No object, no person, no concept can pass through a megacity and remain unchanged.

10. Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta

Sheri and Enitan, two young girls, meet in 60s Lagos. The city changes around them as their friendship grows and survives a civil war, an oil boom and a long string of military dictators. Their central friendship is in some ways a literary forerunner of the complicated relationship between Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan works. I particularly love this because it is set in a Lagos I never saw. A classic.