In 2015 Ayobami Adebayo left her job as an administrative officer in Lagos, Nigeria and came to Whidbey Island. She’d been working on a novel for a couple years—a piece she started while working in a bank, in part out of self-care: “I felt like my soul sort of draining away, so I decided that I was going to write a novel.” But by 2015 Adebayo was having trouble balancing a full-time job with the concentration needed to complete a novel.

So, prompted by a Facebook post, she applied for a Writer in Residence position at Hedgebrook—a women’s writing community on Whidbey, dedicated to peace and justice. In the month there she finished Stay With Me, finding inspiration both in the dedicated time and in the radical distance: “I think I had the freedom to imagine places because I couldn’t very well walk into the street and see what was there.”

Stay With Me garnered major and immediate attention from NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Margaret Atwood, and The New York Times long-time book critic Michiko Kakutani in her final review with the paper. 

The novel tells the story of a 1980s Nigerian couple—Yejide and Akin—as they try to conceive. After they’ve been unable for years, Akin takes a second wife and Yejide doubles down in her attempts. What follows—in both Yejide and Akin’s alternating points of view—has an almost thrillerlike tension and delves into marriage and younger generations struggling with cultural traditions with understated poetic grace and intelligence.

 Tonight at 7pm Adebayo reads at Elliott Bay Book Company—beginning her first U.S. book tour—and making a minor homecoming for the novel, only a few miles from its birthplace.