This is the story of Amusa Sango, crime reporter and dance-band leader, in Lagos (unnamed in the book) in the early 1950s. According to the publisher (Heinemann), Sango eventually “comes to see that what he can do for the developing country in which he lives is more important than the considerable and varied personal pleasures he can find in the hectic life of the city.” That may have been Ekwensi’s intention…or the publisher’s hope but I was never convinced that Sango ever came to see that. He thinks about bigger issues, to be sure. He has moments when he feels guilty for pursuing his smaller pleasures as well as for failing to seize opportunities to act on his better instincts. But the book ends as it began, with no discernible (to me) change in his behavior. Ekwensi paints a vivid, convincing portrait of life in the big city but I was disappointed that several hundred pages later, Sango is acting no differently than he did at the outset. Of course, the book is significant enough that NYRB Books decided to reprint it in 2020, so perhaps my disillusionment is overstated. But I leave the final word to M.A. Orthofer (of The Complete Review) who summarized his thoughts this way: “There's enough to People of the City for it to be of interest—indeed, one of the problems with the book is that there is so much scattered in it, too little of which is followed-up or presented in sufficient depth. Ekwensi's writing is uneven and often rough, but there's some impressive color to it too; even where the story sputters, the writing mostly carries it through.” I agree. ( )

Fast-paced and entertaining. The one drawback I found here was that the characters were too loosely drawn--most of them, I simply couldn't sympathize with. In broad strokes, it's an interesting and well-done novel, but at a personal level, I found the narrative so detached that it left little impression in the end. ( )