Ayòbámi Adébáyò was was in her early 20s when the bus she was travelling on from her job in an engineering institute took a detour to avoid rush-hour traffic in the Nigerian city of Ife. “We cruised through this neighbourhood that was really impoverished, where I hadn’t been before. I remember being astonished that it was there. This was a city I’d been living in since I was about eight and I didn’t know anything about it at all,” she says. She took the memory with her when, shortly afterwards, she flew out to the UK to embark on a new life as a writer.
The ramshackle district, so different from the one in which she had grown up as the daughter of a hospital doctor, gave her a setting for one strand of the second novel that fans of her bestselling debut Stay With Me have spent six long years waiting for. Well, it’s been a busy time, she says over Zoom, from her home in Lagos. Not only did she have to manage the globe-trotting demands of becoming the new star of Nigerian literature, feted in the New York Times, and interviewed in both the Paris Review and Vogue, but she also got married and gave birth.
