Adébáyọ̀'s debut novel tells the story of Yejide and Akin Ajayi, who meet as students at the University of Ife, marry for love in the early 1980s, and then fail, year after year, to have a child. In the world they inhabit — rendered against the coups and military rule of 1980s Nigeria — childlessness is laid at the wife's door, and Yejide endures medical consultations, prophets, pilgrimages, and a climb up a mountain of promised miracles. The crisis breaks when Akin's mother installs a second wife, Funmi, in the household, an arrangement both spouses, themselves children of polygamous homes, had sworn to refuse. What follows is told in alternating voices by Yejide and Akin, and it depends on secrets each is keeping: about the true source of their infertility, about the desperate measures Yejide takes, and about the children who are eventually born and the illnesses written into their blood. Adébáyọ̀ keeps the political turbulence mostly at the edges, letting it press on a marriage being dismantled by grief, shame, and deception, and closes the story decades later with a hard-won possibility of beginning again. The novel was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize and won the 9mobile Prize for Literature.
Author: Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ · Original publisher: Canongate Books (Edinburgh), 2017
