Stay With Me is the second novel I’ve read that highlights the stigma attached to childless women in Nigerian society.

Just like The Girl with the Louding Voice, Stay With Me features a young woman who, worn down by the relentless pressure of her in-laws, resorts to drastic measures to conceive.

Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s novel features Yejide and Akin, a couple who’ve been married for three years. University educated, with good jobs and comfortably off financially, they consider themselves a “modern” couple. The one thing missing from their lives is a child.

Yejide tries everything to become pregnant; beginning with conventional medical tests and examinations. When medical science fails her she takes the more unconventional path of pilgrimages, dances with prophets and, on one occasion, she breastfeeds a goat. Matters come to a head when her in-laws turn up at her home with a second wife for Akin who, they’re sure will make up for Yejide’s failure to do her duty and produce a grandchild to carry the family name forward.

In Yejide’s eyes, her husband’s apparent complicity in this new arrangement is a betrayal of their relationship. She’ll be expected to share Akin with a woman she despises, but the drastic measures she’s willing to take to resolve the issue, come at an even higher price.

Told in alternating narrative points of view, this novel gives an unflattering picture of attitudes to women in Nigeria. Yejide is demeaned and stigmatised, her lack of Akin’s family members never for a second believe he could be responsible for the lack of a child — in their view it’s all Yejide’s fault. They’re wrong, as it turns out.

Yejide would have a child and we would be happy forever. The cost didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how many rivers we had to cross. At the end of it all was this stretch of happiness that was supposed to begin only after we had children and not a minute before.

Ayòbámi Adébáyò sets her debut novel against a background of political unrest. Students are shot during protests; the military intervenes in elections and unrest boils over into the streets. Bizzarrely, armed robbers contact householders to warn them of their plans.

In Stay With Me, she’s crafted a multi-layered story of secrets, betrayals and grief. There are plenty of unexpected twists to the narrative which I can’t describe without spoiling the experience for other readers. It was reasonably enjoyable initially but my interest grew as the complexities of the personalities were revealed.

My attitude to Akin in particular, changed markedly as the novel progressed. To begin with I had down as a coward. Though he had agreed with his wife that theirs would be a monogamous marriage, he does nothing to resist the onslaught from his parents and just accepts their plan for a second wife. He does love Yejide yet he agrees to have another woman share their home and his bed, knowing how much distress this would cause his first wife.

The more we get to know his side of the story however, the more we come to learn that he does not take this step willingly. He’s a desperate man for reasons which become clear much later in the novel. So while I found the decisions he takes (of which the first wife is just one) incredibly frustrating, the fact I wanted to continue reading this book demonstrates how effectively Adébáyò created characters who are flawed, maddening, perplexing but deep down, just human.