Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them.
But four years into their marriage--after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures--Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time--until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin's second wife.
Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant, which, finally, she does--but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine.
An electrifying novel of enormous emotional power, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family.
My Review of Stay with me by Ayobami Adebayo.
It was so unputdownable that I read it in two days. Narrated in the first person by Yejide and Akin, the two main characters of the book, and prominently set in Ilesa, Osun state, Nigeria, Adebayo reveals what it means to be in love, and how love isn't enough most times in relationships and marriages.
The book teaches other ingredients that make a union work, which are far from being just love and attraction.
When Yejide agrees to marry Akin, she feels she has finally escaped from that hollow of loneliness that the death of her mum flung her into, which her step mothers had fun in making sure she never wiggled out from.
Finally, someone who is hers, has come to stay in her life. After losing her mum as soon as she graced the earth, she longs for someone to call her own, her child, her own blood, someone who would call her Moomi.
Unfortunately, the first four years of her marriage are spent longing, praying and preparing for a child that wouldn't come, even after the incessant visits to traditional, spiritual and even medical houses.
Stay with me tells the story of love, deceit and everything in between. Yejide is a strong woman, a fighter, but there's only too much a single woman can take.
Her childlessness, the pressure from her husband's family, a second wife who later joins her in the quest of an offspring production, and the series of fortunate and unfortunate situations hurled on her family by providence.
The book is so beautifully written and well articulated, the characters are flawed, you can simply see what people experience in their marriages, their joys and sorrows, through them.
The book explores the themes of love, pain, yearning, deceit, mental health, and a subtle touch on the political unrest in Nigeria in the eighties and nineties.
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