When We Were Birds

This magical tale of a Trinidadian gravedigger searching for a father he never met proves we should believe the hype * Stella, Sunday Telegraph *
Luminous, gripping, packed with drama, colour and tension… A thoroughly original and emotionally rich examination of love, grief and inheritance… Like the vultures which escort dead souls to the afterlife, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel takes flight and soars * Economist *
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 *
Beguiling, mesmerising, vibrantly alive… There’s a lovely dreaminess to the prose and a heart-stopping romance alongside the supernatural magic but it’s a novel firmly rooted in the nitty gritty of life * Daily Express *
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 *
Lyrical, powerful, thought-provoking… This is a book about the histories we try to erase and the importance of reckoning with them. It is about ‘small lives’; about honouring deaths that have gone ‘unclaimed’, ‘unremembered’, ‘unmourned’ * Irish Independent *
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 *
Rich and rhythmic, triumphant and joyous… An enchanting exploration of love and loss, a ghost story whose characters are haunted by their ancestral responsibilities… I only wish I could have basked in the beauty of [the love story] for longer * New Statesman *
A searing symphony of magic and loss, love and hope, where in the middle of death, love comes shiny, sparkling and alive. This book might just heal you – Marlon James, author of ‘Black Leopard, Red Wolf’

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. Ayanna lives with her husband in London.

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