Stay With Me (Adebayo) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews

[A] stunning debut…Stay With Me …has a remarkable emotional resonance and depth of field. It is, at once, a gothic parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary — and deeply moving — portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.… [Adebayo] is an exceptional storyteller. She writes not just with extraordinary grace but with genuine wisdom about love and loss and the possibility of redemption. She has written a powerfully magnetic and heartbreaking book.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Affecting and powerful.… Adebayo's prose is a pleasure: immediate, unpretentious and flecked with whip-smart Nigerian-English dialogue. She handles weighty themes with an absence of sentimentality.
Sunday Times (UK)


(Starred review.) Adebayo slowly reveals [the couple's] unspoken shame by having both narrate chapters covering the same events.… Her methodical exposure of her characters' secrets…culminates in a tender, satisfying conclusion.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [An] emotionally powerful first novel that relies…on old-fashioned storytelling.… Adebayo's work makes a blazing entry onto the list of young, talented writers from Nigeria. Readers who pick up this debut novel will not put it down until they've finished. —Ally Bissell
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Adebayo describes parenthood and love with heartbreaking prose. She deftly reveals secrets and the decisions that set life-altering events in motion. The story's fast pace brings surprising twists.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Set against a backdrop of student protests, a presidential assassination, and a military coup, Adebayo's novel captures how the turmoil of Nigerian life in the 1980s and '90s seeps into the most personal of decisions — to fight for…one's family. [A] fine young writer.
Kirkus Reviews