A Broken People’s Playlist is a collection of short stories with underlying themes so beautifully woven that each story flows into the other seamlessly. From its poignant beginning in “Lost Stars” a story about love and its fleeting, transient nature to the gritty, raw musical prose encapsulated in “In The City”, a tale of survival set in the alleyways of the waterside. A Broken People’s Playlist is a mosaic of stories about living, loving, and hurting through very familiar sounds, in very familiar ways, and finding healing in the most unlikely places.
The stories are also part-homage and part-love letter to Port Harcourt (the city which most of them are set in). The prose is distinctive as it is concise and unapologetically Nigerian. And because the collection is infused with the magic of evocative storytelling, everyone is promised a story, a character, to move or haunt them.
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I don’t think I’ve ever said this about a book, but this one is Gold on Paper. This is the best collection of short stories I’ve read so far. You’ll laugh, cry, laugh again, and cry again. I love creative writing and unique ideas, and in this case, the author writes stories inspired by music and most of them have music as an integral part of the plot.
