Nala Chioma Okafor can predict a lottery winner six months before the ticket is bought. It is the most valuable skill she owns, and she is about to aim it at a man.

Raised on concrete steps in Surulere, watching her mother count and recount money that was never quite enough, Nala learned early that security is something you accumulate and that anyone who can leave you eventually will. Now thirty one, freshly divorced and working for a firm that turns human behaviour into profit, she designs a plan of ruthless precision: identify a future winner, engineer his affection, and secure the life she was never handed.

The winner is Raj Arjun Mehta, a quiet, watchful software engineer who builds community projects and gives his attention like a gift. The plan works. And then, before she can execute it, Raj does something no model predicted: he gives the money away.

What follows is not the story Nala designed. It is the harder, truer one, of a woman whose sharpest instrument has always been aimed at protecting herself, learning what it costs to be known. Moving from Lagos to Abuja, from the Calabar carnival to the light of Bandra West, from Dakar to a lighthouse on the Badagry shore, The Lottery of Love asks what separates measuring a life from truly living one and whether love can survive being built on a lie.

For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nikki May and Sonali Dev.

An intelligent story about ambition, forgiveness, and the difference between security and belonging.