The Second Wife

The story is set in 1980s Nigeria and centers on a young couple, Ekin and Yejide, highly educated and living comfortably in a big city. They met and fell in love at university and agreed before marriage never to accept the polygamy of their parents' generation. They wanted a love that belonged only to each other. Yet four years into the marriage, Yejide still has not conceived. In Nigeria, children are not only a matter of family face but also of inheritance; elders keep visiting to urge Ekin to take another wife and continue the family line. Yejide submits to test after test and treatment after treatment, smiling through the scrutiny of church, hospital, and relatives. She thinks she still has time—until one day Ekin's family rings the doorbell with a young woman and announces that she is to be Ekin's second wife. Shock, anger, and jealousy tear open the surface of the marriage. Yejide realizes that only pregnancy seems able to save her place, and to become pregnant she is willing to pay a price far beyond imagination. Told alternately from the two perspectives, the novel sets the cracks within the family against the turbulent political and social background of 1980s Nigeria, asking how many choices of her own a woman can still have between tradition, religion, family, and love. Shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction, this is Ayobami Adebayo's widely acclaimed representative novel.