Echoes of Hope
Novel, 2026. Kindle edition out now.
Paperback, in English and French: 25 November 2026
“Their indifference struck harder than the bullet.”
Chapter 1
Turn the pages of Echoes of Hope from the cover to the end of chapter 1, exactly as they are printed.
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The novel
Falsely accused of terrorism and locked away for four years, Habeeb Ajao walks out of a Paris prison in the summer of 2020.
Seeking a new beginning, he leaves for Nigeria, his father’s homeland, only to find a family that rejects the Frenchwoman he loves, a police force that shoots first, and a generation rising up under one cry: #EndSARS. Caught between two countries and one fight, Habeeb must discover whether a single voice can survive in a world built to silence it.
A powerful novel of love, faith and resistance, and a vivid portrait of autumn 2020, when the youth of Nigeria refused to stay quiet and France was torn between fear and freedom.
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“I really admire how you create a connection between the prejudices in a western country to the corrupt government of an African one. It works.”

The essay
My journey into the mind of an atheist
Coming soon
If God created the world, who created God?
At twelve years old, in a classroom in Lagos, the author stood up to argue that teachers matter more than farmers and defended an argument he didn’t know would define his life. Two decades later, he set out on a journey to read the atheists seriously: Dawkins, Hitchens, Hawking, Krauss. He wants to understand them, on their own terms and in their own words.
What he found makes the pages of this book.
Moving between a Nigerian classroom, a Paris sidewalk, a pathology lab, and the pages of Socrates, Ibn Sina and Al-Ghazali, this book follows one mind’s attempt to answer the oldest question there is: why is there something rather than nothing?
Part memoir, part invitation, Who Created God? asks you to think it through, one honest question at a time.
Lines from the book
Lies leave footprints, and those footprints are rarely erased.
Habeeb
48.86° N, 2.35° E
Summer 2020. Habeeb walks out of prison, cleared after four years.
6.52° N, 3.38° E
October 2020. A generation rises under one cry: #EndSARS.
Loved Purple Hibiscus? Here are nine novels about Nigeria, from Achebe to today, with family, faith, politics and Lagos at their heart.
Echoes of Hope begins in 2020, between Paris and Lagos. Here is why that autumn, and why both cities.
What #EndSARS was, what happened at the Lekki toll gate on 20 October 2020, and why the novel keeps returning to it.

The author
I write to preserve the memories that the powerful wants to erase.
A. R. Raazol is a painter, writer and independent thinker whose work bridges visual art and literature.
Echoes of Hope is his debut novel, a project born from emotional turmoil and a belief in the power of honest, unfiltered storytelling.
When not writing or painting, he is most often found reading, researching, or composing his own perfumes.
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