Stay With Me

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION’There are things even love can’t do . . . If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love . . .’Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything – arduous pilgrimages, medical consultations, appeals to God. But when her relatives insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair.Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria, Stay With Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief, and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood. It is a tale about our desperate attempts to save ourselves and those we love from heartbreak.

Reviews of Stay With Me

Scorching, gripping, ultimately lovely — Margaret Atwood This terrific first novel (shortlisted for the Baileys women's prize for fiction) deals with the daily stresses of living with the political upheavals of the time but the real drama is happening in Yejide's womb. Adebayo unfolds the many layers of truth with insight and skill * * The Times * * A thoroughly contemporary style that is all her own . . . clever and funny . . . despite the intense sadness of her subject matter, she has produced a bright, big-hearted demonstration of female spirit, as well as the damage done by the boundlessness of male pride * * Guardian * * One of the must-reads books of the year so far: Stay With Me has it all, including big themes of love, grief and jealousy, a fantastic female protagonist plus it reads like a page-turning thriller * * Stylist * * Affecting and powerful . . . Adebayo's prose is a pleasure: immediate, unpretentious and flecked with whip-smart Nigerian-English dialogue * * Sunday Times * * This deeply impressive novel of infertility, loneliness and longing is the first by the hotly-tipped Adebayo and it packs a tremendous punch * * Daily Mail * * This confident and fearless writer challenges us to think about marriage from all perspectives in her first novel . . . Stay With Me is the closely observed, heartbreaking and original tale of the desperate attempts we make to save ourselves from severing the very bonds that make us * * ELLE * * This impressive debut creates, in deceptively simple prose, a portrait of a marriage in crisis in a deeply patriarchal and oppressive society * * Mail on Sunday * * This tale of a Nigerian couple under familial pressure to conceive is a subtle and unsentimental triumph . . . A tale of real complexity and humanity, part psychological observation and social study * * Financial Times * * Beautiful and resonant . . . I was entranced * * Grazia * *