Books

Ìrètí Omagbemi did not marry into an empire. She built one. From a car-boot food stall on a Lagos campus to an international restaurant group, she and her husband Ajayi raised Eko Prime Cuisine together over two decades of hunger, hard relocations in search of brighter opportunities, and quiet stubbornness. Then, on Boxing Day, Ajayi dies without leaving a will, and Ìrètí discovers how quickly a woman can be made a stranger to her own life's work. His family arrives before the mourning is over. His brother wants her judged unfit to hold what she made. And the lawyer she has trusted for thirty years turns out to be the first of several people she should not have. Outgunned and running short of allies, she accepts help from a younger consultant with a network she fully intends to use and then walk away from. What she does not account for is what it costs to step into the limelight she has avoided for years. A Mourning Love Story is a novel about grief, inheritance and the price of ambition, set in a Lagos of boardrooms, courtrooms and family sitting rooms where the fiercest battles are fought. Ìrètí will fight for everything she built. The question the book asks is what she is willing to find out along the way.