Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo

This is one of those books about what could very well be about normal life. But it's told in such an engaging and intriguing way. Adebayo is able to take the things that we all deal with - longing, loss, infidelity, belief - and show us how extraordinary we all really are. In a lot of ways, Stay With Me is a mirror reflecting our own desires, shortcomings, and struggles.

We learn this by experiencing the lives of Yejide and Akin, who live in Nigeria in the 1980's. Yejide, and her mother-in-law, want nothing more than for Yejide to have a baby. But Yejide and Akin struggle to conceive. What follows is their story through 3 pregnancies (4, if you include a hysterical pregnancy) told against an almost casual backdrop of a government coup, polite extortion, a visit to a healer to conceive, polygymy, sickle-cell disease, and even possibly murder.

But to be clear, the book isn't a murder mystery, or a story of how magic can cause miracles, or a tale of what a polygymous marriage is like. It's about two people who met in college, fell in love, got married, and now want a baby. It's about how tradition competes with modernity. How fatherhood isn't necessarily about biology. It's a cautionary tale, much like the folktales Adebayo deliciously weaves in about how people will do almost anything to get what they want, including ruining their own lives. It's also about how the one thing you think you want, might be the one thing that causes you the most pain.

It's a hearthbreaking, beautifully told narrative that was enhanced by listening to the audiobook, narrated by Adjoa Andoh.