Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home

Balaraba Ramat Yakubu

Translated from the Hausa by Aliyu Kamal

Blaft

126 pages, Rs 250

Beginning in the late 1980s, northern Nigeria saw a boom in popular fiction written in the Hausa language. Known as littattafan soyyaya (“love literature”), these novels are often inspired by Hindi films—which have been hugely popular among Hausa speakers for decades—and are primarily written by women. Sin is an Islamic soap opera complete with polygamous households, virtuous women, scheming harlots, and black magic.