First published 2015
Job has convinced everyone in Nebraska that he's a doctor, but Ifi discovers the truth after their arranged marriage brings her from Nigeria to America. Her husband is actually a college dropout living an elaborate deception. Ifi finds herself pulled into Job's web of lies, helping maintain the fiction of his medical career to their new community. Their fragile arrangement works until Cheryl appears. She is Job's first wife, an American woman he married years earlier to obtain his green card. Cheryl's return threatens to expose everything Job has built. His carefully constructed double life begins to crumble as he struggles to manage two wives and a false identity. Ifi must decide whether to continue supporting her husband's deception or face the consequences of his unraveling lies. The novel explores how far people will go to reinvent themselves and what happens when the weight of pretense becomes too heavy to bear.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America, Nebraska, Nigeria
Period: 21st-century
288 pages · Kindle Edition · Coffee House Press