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.
