ABOUT THE BOOK
In Lagos, a choir master falls in love with a tall, beautiful young woman who does not yet know who he is.
By the time she does, she has given him four children, a lifetime of grace—and the quiet, devastating entirety of herself.
Told through the eyes of Simi, their eldest daughter, My Father Was a Polygamist; My Mother Was the Price is the story of a proud Yoruba patriarch who took five wives and countless mistresses—and the woman who survived him. Not by leaving. But by building her freedom in secret, one silent year at a time.
He feasted on life. She paid the price.
For every daughter who watched her mother shrink.
Simi Adeyemi-Briggs grew up in the shadow of a man who believed the world existed to serve him. Chief Adetoba Adeyemi—charismatic choir master, successful businessman, and serial collector of wives—ruled his household with the particular authority of someone who had never once doubted his own importance. He charmed his way through life, accumulating women and children like possessions. He never raised his voice. He never raised his hand. He simply took what he wanted, and expected grace in return.
His first wife—Simi’s mother—gave him that grace. For fifty years.
Temilola Adeyemi was seventeen when she met him, a tall, luminous girl with a book pressed against her thigh and a laugh like church bells. By eighteen, she was pregnant. By twenty, she had been sent away to boarding school. By thirty, she had learned to smile through the arrival of each new wife, each new betrayal, each new reminder that the man she married would never be satisfied with what she offered.
She stayed. Not out of weakness. Out of a kind of strength that only becomes visible when you know where to look.
A sweeping, intimate novel about polygamy, betrayal, and the silence women keep.
Spanning decades and continents—from the churches and compounds of Lagos to the grey skies of London—this is a story about what happens to a woman’s soul when love is divided without her consent. About the daughters who inherit both the wounds and the resilience of their mothers. About the quiet, extraordinary strength of a woman who refused to be only what happened to her.
Simi tells her mother’s story with unflinching honesty, laying bare the betrayals that shaped her family: the wives who arrived one by one, the mistresses who existed in the margins, the siblings who stole and vilified and tried to rewrite the hierarchy of the family. And at the center of it all, a mother who built lifeboats in secret while appearing merely to float.
Because sometimes the most radical act is not leaving. It’s staying—and quietly, over decades, making yourself free.
What readers are saying:
“A devastatingly beautiful debut. Moji.Sola writes with the precision of a surgeon and the heart of a daughter who has finally found the words.”
“I finished this book and immediately called my mother. It’s that kind of novel.”
“The final scene broke me and put me back together. The photograph, the inscription, the kettle on—it’s all perfection.”
“This is not just a book about polygamy. It’s a book about what women survive, how they survive it, and what they build in the spaces no one is watching.”
This book is for:
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Every woman who has ever loved too generously and been repaid too poorly
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Every daughter who spent her childhood reading emotional temperatures
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Every mother who built freedom in secret while appearing merely to float
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Anyone who has ever wondered: Why did she stay?
My Father Was a Polygamist; My Mother Was the Price is a literary fiction debut that will stay with you long after the final page.
Scroll up and click “Buy Now” to discover the mother who stayed—and the daughter brave enough to tell her story.
