Another great PW: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

Yay! Congratulations, Lola! “Gripping…masterful..”

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
Lola Shoneyin, Morrow, $23.99
Blind acceptance splinters a polygamous marriage in Shoneyin’s gripping debut set in modern-day Nigeria. Bolanle Alao, the newest and youngest of Baba Segi’s wives, threatens to upset the balance of power–she is educated and beautiful, though naïve about the relationship dynamics among the other three wives in the house. Raped at 15, Bolanle considers herself disgraced and unwanted until Baba Segi, an overweight, malodorous businessman welcomes her into his family, no questions asked, until it seems she cannot conceive. Like the other wives, she feels she has been saved by Baba Segi, who accepts all of them politely, but beyond brief mentions of his sexual encounters and visits to the toilet, Baba Segi is a peripheral character. When greedy Iya Segi and Iya Femi plot to run young, sweet Bolanle out of the family, the result is disaster. It is Bolanle’s unexpected submissiveness that leads her and her husband to uncover a secret that forces him to assert his control over the family. Shoneyin masterfully disentangles four distinct stories, only to subtly expose what is common among them. (July)

“Exotic”

I’ve had conversation with several editors and publishers recently that made me scratch my head. I represent clients from all over the world and from many different cultures; it’s something I’m very proud of and feel passionate about. Plus, books about other cultures sell. So I’ve thought–until recently, when I was told that “multicultural is not working right now” and “readers are not really going for the ‘exotic’.” Before I get on my high horse and start holding forth on the merits of publishing books by authors from around the world that shine the light on different cultures, I wondered if this was true. Is “multi-culti” dead? An informal poll yielded similar responses. No, it’s not dead. But it’s no longer a fad, the way that, say, paranormal romance is a current fad. It used to be that simply having a foreign-sounding name was enough to get editors salivating. Now, a writer from Asia, Latin America or Africa is judged by the same standards as an American writer. In my mind, this is actually progress. Being “exotic” should confer no special advantage. But one editor told me that it has become, in her experience, increasingly a disadvantage — bookstores are ordering fewer copies of such books and readers are buying less. Could this really be true? What do you think?