****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.
