What happens when the boy who saved you becomes the man who could destroy you?

Festac Town, Lagos, the 1990s. Tobi and Richard, one Yoruba and one Igbo, meet on the road to school and become inseparable. They have Saturday arcade battles and shared secrets, and a brotherhood that feels like it will last forever.

Then the city starts asking them to choose.

Tobi is sent to a boarding school where silence is survival and seniors rule with whips. Richard builds a kingdom of parties, money and boys who answer only to him. When Richard calls Tobi back into his world, saying no comes at a price: whispers in corridors, footsteps in alleyways, violence on the streets they once owned. Out costs more than you can pay.

Haunted by dreams in which a man in white and a man in black both wear his face, Tobi must decide what he owes the friend who once saved him, and what he owes himself.

Inspired by real events, Glass and Darkness is a raw, tender and unflinching coming-of-age novel about loyalty, peer pressure, faith and forgiveness, and the fragile line between the life you are offered and the life you choose.

For readers who love:

• Nigerian and West African fiction with a vivid sense of place
• Friendships tested to breaking point
• Stories of survival, second chances and redemption

Content note: includes drug use, bullying, gang violence, institutional abuse and depression.

Francis Anderson is the pen name of Dr Olaitan Akinyele, a Chartered Engineer, doctoral scholar and award-winning community advocate based in Aberdeen, Scotland.