Stay With Me

Travel Guide

Nigeria

Life inside the family is difficult enough but when you have the country’s eyes on you, society judging you and your mother in law suggesting her own solutions to the problem, suddenly your problems are not your own, and your life can spiral in unexpected ways

Many characters in the novel have grown up in polygamous households  – common in 1980s Nigeria and so when Akin’s mother persuades him to take a second wife, this is not an unusual suggestion. Yetide gets on well with her mother in law so this creates all kinds of problems in the heart of the family. Family is important here and Yetide and Akin both have to face issues and problems they never would have expected.

Yetide is under increasing pressure to produce a child – everyone has an opinion and comments about this ‘failure’ – a sign of a community where babies are a sign of pride and so much more. Where familial expectations in culture, family and society create a pressure cooker of misery.

This novel also provides Nigerian culture and the Yoruba people. It’s a country stuck right in the middle of a military coup, so destabilization outside as well as within, dividing the country and creating fear.