Tomi Obaro is a senior culture editor at BuzzFeed News. Her cultural criticism and essays have been published in BuzzFeed News, The Morning News, and The Toast. In her debut book, Dele Weds Destiny: A Novel (Knopf), three once-inseparable friends reunite in Lagos, Nigeria, for the first time in 30 years. They met at university and, despite their differences, became friends for life. 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, crisscrossed by love and losses. The old friends, now wives and mothers, are reuniting because Funmi’s daughter, Destiny, is getting married. Hosting the weekend with her wealthy husband, Funmi wants everything to go perfectly. But as the big day approaches, it becomes clear that something is not right. The complexities of their friendship – and the wisdom each has earned – come to bear on a riveting, heartrending moment.
