A love story, a ghost story, a thriller: 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. Yejide St Bernard belongs to a long line of women duty-bound to commune with the dead. Her distant mother, Petronella, has railed against this spectral legacy, but now that she is dying it is incumbent upon her to induct Yejide into powers that will shortly become hers, remaking her from the inside out.
