Re-read. The widowed Feyi hooks up with a stranger, then dates his best friend Nasir, then falls in love with Nasir’s father, and none of that sentence captures the raw transcendence of this novel. It makes me not just cry, but weep, multiple times—not (only) because of the grief but because of the way it vibrates with life, with pain, with joy, with every raw emotion. The friendship matters, the bisexuality matters. It’s so tender and haunting and vibrant and unlike any other romance I’ve read, grounded wholly in the genre yet wholly its own thing. (And not in the pretentious litfic way that purports to do genre better than genre.)
I’m glad I started the god-tier shelf back when I read The Saint of Bright Doors, because Emezi storms in to that category too.