Stay With Me

Written by Linda Malek
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Stay with me by Ayobami Adebayo
Reviewed by Linda
📒📕📘📗📙

After hearing Ayobami read a passage from Stay with me at Baileys Prize, I was sold. Such an intense novel filled with numerous plot twists and turns, I had to take a minute to take it all in and ask myself if what I was reading was for real!? A modern woman in Nigeria, married to a (spineless) man, battles with traditions and customs due to the inability to conceive a child after 4 years of marriage...And no, you won't be able to predict what happens next by any means! Set in the politically unstable Nigerian climate of the 1980s, Ayobami beautifully captures the rage, fury and jealousy in this family epic which manifests itself when biology refuses to align with traditional and societal expectations. The read of the summer.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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