"Exploring the bonds between three women across thirty years, this Nigeria-set debut delves into the complexities of female friendship, love, race, and class with sparkling insights."
Heralding the arrival of a new, crisply lyrical voice in fiction, devotees of novels that centre women’s experiences with wisdom and fresh, thoughtful perspectives will find Tomi Obaro’s Dele Weds Destiny debut utterly un-put-down-able.
It follows the interlocked lives of Zainab, Funmi and Enitan, who first meet as students at university in northern Nigeria. Bound by this seminal experience, a time when all three young women made huge leaps in discovering who they were, their lives diverge on different paths around the world, and they’re now reunited at the wedding of Funmi's daughter, Destiny, with each character brilliantly nuanced.
As for those divergent paths, which we follow alongside the 2015 context of Destiny’s wedding, Funmi lives in luxury as the wife of a big businessman, New York-based Enitan is separating from her husband (a white man she eloped with), and Zainab is a single mother to four sons.
As seen during their reunion, the women exemplify tremendous differences in status and experiences, and yet their connections still hold, with their daughters further revealing generational connections and divergences that ring with universal truths about life, experiences of friendship, and what it means to feel at home.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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Three women. Three decades. The friendship of a lifetime.
Zainab, Funmi and Enitan first meet at University in northern Nigeria, all learning how to become themselves. It's an experience that binds the three very different women together. When Enitan moves to New York to elope with a white man, Zainab and Funmi are left behind, with drastically different fortunes.
Over the course of thirty years, their lives and friendships diverge and change. Enitan is separating from her husband, trying to understand her daughter Remi. Zainab finds herself the sole breadwinner for her husband and their four sons. And Funmi is living a life of confined luxury, as the wife of a successful, shady businessman.
But theirs is a friendship that can endure decades of distance. And in 2015, they are reunited for the first time for the wedding of Funmi's daughter, Destiny.
Here they will reflect on their pasts, the things they loved and lost - but the present brings unexpected surprises too, because their daughters, Remi and Destiny, might just be as rebellious and open-hearted as they once were.
DELE WEDS DESTINY is the heartfelt, vivid and sparkling debut novel by editor and writer Tomi Obaro, a dazzling new voice in fiction. A story of three women, we witness the shared histories, betrayals and triumphs play out, and their unforgettable, enduring friendship.
Dele Weds Destiny features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Sharing Diverse Voices, Contemporary lifestyle fiction, General Fiction, Fiction, Romance / Relationship Stories, Debut Books of the Month, Recommendations, Debuts
Dele Weds Destiny is available in Paperback, Ebook, Hardback
Dele Weds Destiny was written by Tomi Obaro and published by Hodder Paperback an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
Dele Weds Destiny has 293 pages
£8.99
