A Spell of Good Things

September 1, 2022

From Ad�b�yọ̀, author of the Baileys short-listed Stay with Me, A Spell of Good Things brings together two contemporary Nigerian families through the intertwined lives of a young woman doctor and a boy tending to his family after his father's death. Perennially best-selling Deveraux's Meant To Be features two sisters in 1970s Kansas who must between what they want and what is expected of them (75,000-copy first printing). Though she finally feels at home at her prestigious college in 1998, Lower East Side New Yorker Isabel Rosen still faces emotional crisis in Florin's My Last Innocent Year, moving from a nonconsensual sexual encounter to an affair with a married professor; a highly touted debut (100,000-copy first printing). In Ghanaian British George's debut, Maame, Maddie finally wrests some independence from her parents--a bossy mother forever traveling to Ghana and a father who needs caretaking--and for the first time experiences living on her own; then tragedy strikes (250,000-copy first printing). In Pulitzer Prize finalist Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You, film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane gingerly returns to teach at the New Hampshire boarding school where a classmate was murdered and begins to wonder whether justice was served in convicting the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans. When Melinda's husband runs off with a young celebrity entrepreneur, they dump their newborn on Melinda's doorstep, and she ends up caring for the baby with friend Lauren, whose Greenwich Village brownstone houses a bar called The Sweet Spot, and bartender Olivia; from popular Musical Chairs author Poeppel. Winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize, Florida-born, London-based Tate goes full-length in Brutes, about a bunch of 13-year-old girls in swampy Falls Landing, FL, obsessed with preacher's daughter Sammy--and galvanized by her disappearance.

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Starred review from December 12, 2022
Adébáyọ̀ follows up Stay with Me with this bright and distinctive tragedy set in modern Nigeria. Ẹniọlá, a teenager whose father has lost his job, can no longer pay the tuition at the private school that he’d hoped would enable him to rise from poverty. Wúràọlá is a doctor from a wealthy and politically connected family. She’s overworked in an underfunded hospital, and courted by well-bred Kúnlé, whose mood shifts and possessiveness unnerve her. Ẹniọlá takes an apprenticeship with a tailor, but after he is beaten at school for the unpaid fees, his mother insists Ẹniọlá and his little sister accompany her to beg for money. Things spiral out of control when Ẹniọlá’s parents decide to pay his sister’s tuition with the proceeds but not his. He takes his revenge by joining a gang working for the vengeful politician Fẹ̀sọ̀jaiyé. Wúràọlá, meanwhile, becomes engaged to Kúnlé despite her misgivings, and though her parents are ecstatic, he slaps her at a party. Kúnlé’s father is running against Fẹ̀sọ̀jaiyé, and the story’s violent denouement is as devastating as it is inevitable. Pitch-perfect details provide a sense of the characters’ lives—the red dust caked on Ẹniọlá’s white socks from long walks to school, the soft headscarf worn by Wúràọlá’s mother that “barely whispered”—and as the characters are pushed to the brink, Adébáyọ̀ delivers a searing indictment of the country’s corruption and gender inequalities. This packs a powerful punch. Agent: Kathy Robbins, in association with Clare Alexander of Aitken Alexander Associates.

January 1, 2023
The lives of rich and poor intersect, often violently, in contemporary Nigeria. Ad�b�yọ̀'s second novel--following Stay With Me (2017)--centers on two people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum but with similar fixations on status. Ẹniọl� is a 16-year-old student at a private school who's at risk of expulsion due to his family's inability to pay tuition fees. Nearby, W�r�ọl�, a young doctor from a wealthy family, has just been engaged to K�nl�, a TV news anchor whose father is running for a local governorship. Ẹniọl� is trying to cover up the shame of his father's unemployment, which gets him spat on in the street and whipped at school; W�r�ọl� wants to escape from K�nl�'s escalating physical abuse of her, stoked by his jealousy of her work colleague. In person, their lives overlap only glancingly--Ẹniọl� works as an apprentice at a dress shop where W�r�ọl�'s mother is having a dress prepared for her 50th birthday. But Ad�b�yọ̀'s point is that the classes are interwoven much more deeply than surfaces suggest, that both are equally likely to be undermined by greed, and that small acts of violence become larger ones wherever you go. (The title refers to W�r�ọl�'s mother's bitter observation "that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.") Once Ad�b�yọ̀ introduces a plotline involving rival politicians, the story's trajectory becomes more predictable and moralizing (not to mention more violent). But the novel thrives in its particulars, from Ẹniọl�'s struggle to maintain his dignity while openly begging on the streets, to W�r�ọl�'s tense relationship with her siblings and keeping up appearances. In the process she reveals how stifling--and dangerous--unthinking loyalty to tradition and family can be. A somber study of good intentions undone by money and abuse.

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January 1, 2023
Ad�b�yọ̀'s (Stay with Me, 2017) second novel is a remarkable exploration of power, ambition, and fate. Ẹniọl�, 16, is enrolled with his younger sister at the least expensive private school in Ife, Nigeria. His father had been a history teacher until three years ago, when he was fired. Since then, he has not worked and the family has moved to a small apartment that they only afford by begging. Ẹniọl� apprentices with a tailor and clings to hope that he will still be sent to a much better school, as his father had promised. W�r�ọl�, from a wealthy, influential family, is in her doctoral residency, working for days at a time in understaffed hospital wards while fielding calls from her demanding boyfriend K�nl�. When K�nl�'s father announces a run for political office, W�r�ọl� and Ẹniọl� are set on a path to tragically collide. Ad�b�yọ̀ captures the nuances of interpersonal relationships and the wide-ranging impact of political corruption and violence. She writes her characters, and the world they inhabit, in vivid detail, rendering A Spell of Good Things unforgettable.

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