THE THREE OF US

When a well-to-do British Nigerian couple and the wife's best friend drink way too much wine and whiskey, the fraught triangle of their relationship falls apart.

Agbaje-Williams' striking, often wickedly funny debut is set over the course of one day, divided into three sections. The first is narrated by a married woman whose lifelong best friend, Temi, arrives at her house at noon with wine, chips, and cigarettes. The two hang out and deconstruct Temi's recent dates; we learn that the wife and her husband have begun trying to get pregnant and that Temi sees this as a betrayal. Temi and the husband hate each other and always have. As the day progresses into evening, the second section of the book is told by the husband, the third by Temi. Agbaje-Williams brilliantly captures the inner monologue as well as the conversational style of each of the three, through which their whole cultural milieu takes shape around them, from the expectations of their Nigerian parents to their Smeg fridge and Tesco wine. The husband's section is the funniest as he rages in his head against his wife's friendship with Temi and recalls the history of insults he has endured. But whenever he complains about anything, like the fact that Temi has broken into a special bottle of wine he was saving, his wife says “Kim, there's people that are dying,” a Kardashian reference that he internalizes. “The thought that my wife’s friend was now privy even to our private text messages repulsed and enraged me. I quoted the Kardashians three times like a prayer then resolved to move past the situation for my own sanity and to avoid prison.” The last section is narrated by Temi, whose extreme ideas about men, women, and marriage allow her to rationalize her destructive behavior. As she and the husband move from passive-aggressive sniping to acts of war, as the empty bottles pile up in the recycling, she hatches an evil plan. With three unlikable, unreliable narrators, and with both patriarchal arrangements and feminist alternatives depicted as self-serving transactions, Agbaje-Williams throws caution to the wind and pulls off a surprise win.

An original and potent comedy of manners with an ingenious final twist.