[1] The body parts are stolen from a hospital run by Dr. Kighare Menka, a surgeon who treats war victims and whose friend Duyole Pitan-Payne is about to begin a job at the United Nations in New York City as the representative of Nigeria.

Wole Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, was inspired by a report that Nigerians are among the happiest people on Earth, began writing almost two decades later and before the COVID-19 pandemic.

[2][3][5] Chronicles which is Soyinka's third novel was released in 2021 by Bookcraft Africa, Pantheon Books and Bloomsbury Circus, almost fifty years since his last novel, Season of Anomy which was published in 1973.

"[12] Neil Munshi of the Financial Times described Chronicles as "a brutally satirical look at power and corruption in Nigeria, told in the form of a whodunnit involving three university friends.

"[10] Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez writing for The New York Times noted that Soyinka wrote the novel as "lament for the spirit of his native Nigeria," and while the plot is "convoluted, obscure at times, [and] often tying itself in too many knots," the novel is ultimately a successful exploration of "the crossroads between corruption, religious fanaticism, endemic resentments and a legacy of colonial divisiveness.