Author(s): Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

Novel | Caribbean

A gorgeously immersive, mesmerising and life-affirming literary debut - a love story and a ghost story set in modern day Trinidad. Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in the city of Port Angeles to seek his fortune, young and beautiful and lost. Estranged from his mother, he is convinced that the father he never met may be waiting for him somewhere amid these bustling streets. Meanwhile in an old house on a hill, Yejide's mother is dying. And she is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide- the power to talk to the departed. Darwin and Yejide's destinies are intertwined, and they will find one another in the ancient cemetery at the heart of the city, where trouble is brewing and destiny awaits... Embedded with a timeless, mythic magic, and yet alive with a fresh, modern sensibility, this hypnotic literary debut is a masterpiece of rhythm, exuberance, heart, loss in cycle with renewal and darkness with light- a reckoning with a grief that runs back generations and a defiant, joyful affirmation of hope.

Review: 
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's radiant first novel embraces elements of multiple genres, binding them through incantatory language steeped in the rhythms, fables and spirituality of her Trinidadian homeland. At its centre are two young people wrestling with their destinies... Dickens is one of the less expected literary influences to haunt these magic-realism-inflected pages, but as the book navigates the meaning of family and inheritance, its distinctiveness shines out: this is dramatic, joyful, intensely satisfying fiction * Observer *
Tender and lonely and powerful... A love letter to Trinidad [and] a vivid debut about romance and loss in the Caribbean... It also centres another kind of love: the complexity of mothering and its beautiful and terrible consequences... Lloyd Banwo conjures an aching sexual energy, places the lovers in deliciously paced jeopardy and takes the tale to an agreeably thundery climax * Guardian *
Soulful, haunting, a deep-rooted love story... Uniquely tackling themes of grief, identity and acceptance, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's rhythmic prose builds tension at every step... A tale of finding one's self * Stylist *
Suffused with myth and magic, eerie, enchanting... The atmosphere is intensely conjured, with squalling storms, luscious food and sinister acts by night... In the Trinidad of Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, the departed are never gone * Sunday Telegraph *
Mythic and captivating, electric, breathtaking... The anchor of this story is Trinidad itself. Banwo roots the reader in its traditions and rituals, in the sights and sounds and colours and smells of fruit vendors, fish vendors, street preachers and schoolchildren, in the glorious matriarchy by which lineage is upheld * New York Times Book Review *
A fabulous journey to a fictionalised Trinidad, where reality and imagination, the living and the dead converge... Lovers of the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende will feel right at home... A warm, vibrant and ultimately, uplifting debut * Sunday Independent *
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a rising literary star from a region which gave the world three Nobel Laureates in literature. She comes from a lineage of high Caribbean Lit and it shows. This is an impressive debut about love, family, ancestry, the dead and the living. Read this book for its magic and realism too, for its deft weaving together of lives... Ayanna Lloyd Banwo conjures old magic and yet she is a strong, new voice -- Monique Roffey, author of 'The Mermaid of Black Conch'

Author Biography: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is now a Creative and Critical Writing PhD candidate. Her work has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe and PREE, among others, and shortlisted for Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. When We Were Birds is her first novel; she is now working on her second which will be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2025. Ayanna lives with her husband in London.