Ayobami Adebayo: Stay with me (2017)
257 pages
English language
Published Aug. 22, 2017
"A novel about a married Nigerian couple who must grapple with staggering levels of loss and betrayal in their quest to create a family for themselves" --
Wow. It was a stunning story of deception, love, and parenthood. And it left me feeling bereft. My heart just ached for Yejide. This should definitely be in your "to read" pile.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/books/review-ayobami-adebayo-stay-with-me.html?smid=url-share
2.5 stars. We need a new genre: Literary soap opera. This book was well-written and an interesting look into 20th-century Nigerian life, but the repeated twists and big “reveals” were exhausting and difficult to believe. Additionally, I’m not the sort of basic reader who complains about not wanting to read “sad” books, and I know sad stories can often be moving and serve to illuminate larger truths. But “Stay With Me” was such a parade of tragedies without any apparent purpose or larger meaning behind them, that it made me feel like it was little more than misery porn, in the vein of books like “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara.
