Dele Weds Destiny
A novel
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- ¥740
発行者による作品情報
A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The story of three once-inseparable college friends in Nigeria who reunite in Lagos for the first time in thirty years—a sparkling novel about the extraordinary resilience of female friendship.
“A story rendered with so much heart.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, best-selling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six
Funmi, Enitan, and Zainab first meet at university in Nigeria and become friends for life despite their differences. Funmi is beautiful, brash, and determined; Enitan is homely and eager, seeking escape from her single mother's smothering and needy love; Zainab is elegant and reserved, raised by her father's first two wives after her mother's death in childbirth.
Their friendship is complicated but enduring, and over the course of the novel, the reader learns about their loves and losses. How Funmi stole Zainab's boyfriend and became pregnant, only to have an abortion and lose the boyfriend to police violence. How Enitan was seduced by an American Peace Corps volunteer, the only one who ever really saw her, but is culturally so different from him—a Connecticut WASP—that raising their daughter together put them at odds. How Zainab fell in love with her teacher, a friend of her father’s, and ruptured her relationship with her father to have him.
Now, some thirty years later, the three women are reunited for the first time, in Lagos. The occasion: Funmi’s daughter, Destiny, is getting married. Enitan brings her American daughter, Remi. Zainab travels by bus, nervously leaving her ailing husband in the care of their son. Funmi, hosting the weekend with her wealthy husband, wants everything to go perfectly. But as the big day approaches, it becomes clear that something is not right. As the novel builds powerfully, the complexities of the mothers’ friendship—and the private wisdom each has earned—come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment of decision. Dele Weds Destiny is a sensational debut from a dazzling new voice in contemporary fiction.
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Three Nigerian college friends reunite after decades in this lush if busy debut. In 2015, wealthy Funmi Akingbola invites her best friends to the wedding of her medical student daughter, Destiny, in Lagos. Enitan, who eloped to America with a white man she is now divorcing, arrives with her own college-age daughter, Remi. Zainab, a Muslim caring for her husband after a series of strokes, survives a violent robbery on the bus to Lagos. Together, the friends tiptoe around memories of past struggles, which Obaro explores more fully in flashbacks to 1983, when all three met at a Nigerian university. As a freshman, Funmi draws attraction from dreamy literature student Zainab's politically active boyfriend, while helping Enitan with her coursework. Meanwhile, Zainab enlists her friends to help convince her father to allow her to marry his protégé, and Funmi conscripts Enitan for support during her illegal abortion. Back in 2015, not a lot happens until the end, with a big surprise involving the bride. Obaro offers plenty of sumptuous depictions of Nigerian culture via Destiny's wedding, as well as perceptive observations about the characters, though the dual timeline makes this feel at once rushed and overstuffed, and leaves the characters underdeveloped. The result is pleasant if not entirely memorable.
