SONGS OF Six WOMEN: loves. lessons. One redemption.

You may already be wondering whether you want to read another story about a man who couldn't commit. Fair. David Adeyemi might be exactly that man. A Lagos poet who has spent sixteen years loving six women, writing beautiful poems about all of them, and never once asking what they wanted. A man who stands at gates. A man who keeps a drawer full of letters he never sends. A man who turns the people he loves into lessons in his own education. But this is not only his story. And that is the whole point. Six women. Six songs. One life spent learning what those songs actually meant. There is Amara, whose father planned her life before she was born-and whose choice teaches David the first hard truth about longing. There is Fatima, a storyteller in Jos who refuses to be rescued and tells him so to his face. There is Chioma, a painter rebuilding herself from the ruins of a marriage that tried to erase her. There is Amina, a translator in Cairo who leaves her comfortable life with the radio on. There is Nneoma, a cloth merchant in Calabar who carries buckets in a flood and tells a poet he is not needed as a door. And there is Ngozi, a schoolteacher in Ogbomoso who waited once, stopped waiting, and built a life she chose. Songs of Six Women is a novel of extraordinary emotional intelligence-a literary love story in prose and verse that takes the familiar shape of a man's romantic education and turns it inside out. Each of the six women gets her own chapter, her own voice, her own accounting of what she chose and why. David is not the hero of their stories. He is a witness. And it takes him most of his life to understand the difference. For readers who love: - Literary love stories with the sweep and warmth of great African fiction- Verse and prose woven together into a single, singing whole- Self-aware, sharp-eyed writing that refuses to romanticize the man who can't commit- Stories about staying-about the ordinary, daily courage of choosing someone again and again, even while afraid This is a book about the difference between longing and love. About the doors we walk past and the doors we finally walk through. About the truth that every person who enters your life is a teacher-and the only question is whether you're willing to learn. Six loves. Six lessons. One redemption. And a Saturday that is the only kind of forever anyone gets.