Ayobami Adebayo’s sensitive, exposing first novel is about the lies and false hopes we tell ourselves to stay sane, and the cataclysmic impact the decisions we make can have on the people we love...The scope of Stay With Me is huge, and yet, the writing of it is painfully intimate, the problems and wounds so personal and tightly wrought that, at times, you want to put the book down and step away, as if, with every new revelation, you are further intruding, unforgivably, into this couple’s life.

Fortunately, the brilliance of Adebayo’s storytelling stops you.

In Nigerian society a childless woman is a tragedy, and considered to have probably brought it on herself. And it is not just her apparent inability to conceive that Yejide is up against. Her husband, Akin, has been coerced by his mother, Moomi, to take a second wife, in the hopes that he will get her pregnant instead. “You have had my son between your legs for two more months and still your stomach is flat,” Moomi tells Yejide when the new wife is also not yet pregnant. “Close your thighs to him, I beg you … If you don’t he will die childless. I beg you, don’t spoil my life. He is my first son, Yejide.”
Such animated dialogue is a delight throughout the novel, and Moomi’s voice is the loudest among the vivid, persuasive characters who bring this Yoruba community to life... though there is still room for growth, she has a thoroughly contemporary style that is all her own. Her clever and funny take on domestic life and Nigerian society is a welcome addition to her country’s burgeoning literary scene. 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.