Stay with Me: A novel

by Ayobami Adebayo

A New York Times Notable Book • “A thoroughly contemporary—and deeply moving—portrait of a marriage.... In the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
Ilesa, Nigeria. Ever since they first met and fell in love at university, Yejide and Akin have agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage—after consulting fertility doctors and healers, and trying strange teas and unlikely cures—Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time—until her in-laws arrive 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.
 
The unforgettable story of a marriage as seen through the eyes of both husband and wife, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family.

• ISBN10: 1101974419
• ISBN13: 9781101974414
• Publish Date: 10 July 2018 (first published 2 March 2017)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 272
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781101974414

Reviews

[clementine]

I really liked the concept of this book, and it was generally well-written and interesting. But it was a bit uneven, with some things coming out of nowhere and then barely mentioned again. (Most obviously, Funmi's murder.) I thought Yejide was a fully-formed, flawed, but sympathetic character, her heartbreaking reaction to repeated tragedy completely believable. I found her husband Akin a bit less sympathetic, though he is meant to be likeable. I especially enjoyed the incorporation of Nigerian fairytales into the narrative.

[mercurial]

4.5/5
Both heartbreaking and heartwarming...
Honest, raw portrayal of romantic and familial relationships

[rohshey]

This book sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of Nigerian society and its culture. A devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief, and all consuming bonds of motherhood. A book that tells us the desperate attempts we seek to save ourselves and those we love from heartbreak.

It's not a perfect novel but it's one I'm not hesitating to recommend.

[gmcgregor]

What exactly it means to be married, and married well, is at the heart of Ayobami Adebayo's Stay With Me. When we first meet Yejide, we learn that technically, she's had a long marriage. She's lived apart from her husband, Akin, for many years, but she receives an invitation to attend his father's funeral as his guest that sends her on a reminisce about their past, and how their separation came to be. They met at university in Nigeria, and though they were both seeing other people at the time, quickly fell in love and got married. Their marriage was happy, except that even after several years, they were childless. Though Akin and Yejide were a modern couple, his parents were traditional, and if their first-born son couldn't produce an heir for the family with his wife, they had a solution: a second wife.

This is the first in a series of what come to be deep, deep cracks in Akin and Yejide's relationship. Yejide is desperate to keep her husband to herself, and knows that in order to do that, she must somehow become pregnant...which she does. The plot has several twists and turns, and while I'm usually not especially fussed about spoilers, this is one of the cases where I feel like letting the plot unfold as you read is important. Though the book is relatively short (under 300 pages), Adebayo deals with some powerful themes: love, marriage, mental health, trust, family, sex, and what it means to be a parent.

This is a debut novel, and in some ways, it shows. Some of the plot twists seemed to be a little too difficult to believe, and it sometimes felt that they were being deployed too quickly, with too little time for each to really settle and resonate before the next one came along. And while I appreciated the way she paralleled the upheavals and tensions of the central marriage alongside the political turmoil roiling Nigeria during the lives of the characters, references to it often felt shoehorned in. I felt like the book should have been longer, which could have ameliorated both issues by letting the plot breathe a bit.

At the end of the day, though, this is the kind of debut which makes me really excited for the author's follow-up(s). Yejide is a fantastic character...she's not always likable, and often makes poor choices, but remains sympathetic throughout. The perspective we get into her childhood informs the person she comes to be, and I wish we'd gotten a bit more of this with Akin. We get some, but he's less well-developed than she is and I think the book could have been even stronger if we'd gotten more of his perspective. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed this book and look forward to following Adeyabo's career. I would recommend it, but maybe not to everyone. I think it'll appeal most to readers who enjoy character-based domestic dramas and don't mind if they occasionally trend towards the implausible in their plotting.