Nikki May Books in Order

If you want the sharp, friendship-first debut: Wahala
If you want a bigger, more sweeping family story: This Motherless Land
If you want the best introduction to Nikki May: Wahala → This Motherless Land

Nikki May was born in Bristol and raised in Lagos, and that split background sits right at the heart of her work. She is Anglo-Nigerian, and her fiction keeps returning to questions of belonging, identity, and what it means to move between worlds.

She spent most of her childhood and teens in Nigeria, and she has spoken about growing up in Lagos at a time when books felt precious. Later she studied medicine at the University of Lagos, but at twenty she left the course and moved to London. That sharp change, from one expected life into a much less certain one, helps explain why so many of her characters are trying to build a life for themselves while carrying family pressure and other people's ideas about who they should be.

Writing was not her first career. For years she worked in advertising and eventually ran her own agency, a job that taught her how to write with pace, trim a sentence, and deal with feedback. It also gave her a close view of ambition, image, and the little performances people put on in work and social life, all things that show up in her novels.

The leap into fiction began with friendship, food, and conversation.

After a long lunch with friends at a Nigerian restaurant, May found herself sketching out characters on the train home. She later took a short creative writing course, wrote the opening chapters, and kept going until the story became Wahala.

That debut novel, published in 2022, follows Ronke, Boo, and Simi, three mixed-race friends in London whose long friendship starts to buckle when a glamorous woman from their past steps back into their lives. Readers tend to like Wahala for its mix of sharp humor, social tension, and painfully recognizable friendship politics. There is style and fun in it, but also bite. The book won the Comedy Women in Print New Voice Prize, and it is being adapted for television by the BBC.

Then came This Motherless Land.

Her second novel widens the frame. Built as a reimagining of Mansfield Park, it begins in Lagos, where Funke loses her mother and is sent to England, and follows the changing bond between Funke and her cousin Liv across years, family damage, and two very different worlds. It keeps May's interest in identity and class, but in a broader family story where love, grief, and belonging matter just as much as plot.

Across both books, certain patterns keep surfacing. May writes about women who are smart, funny, restless, and not always honest with themselves. She writes about race and class without turning her novels into lectures. Food matters. Hair matters. Family history matters. So does the strange feeling of being told who you are by people who only see one slice of you.

She now lives in Dorset with her husband, two standard schnauzers, and, by her own account, too many books. Even in the short notes she shares about herself, you get the sense of a writer who came to fiction after a whole other life, and brought the mess, humor, and double vision of that life with her.