When We Were Birds

byAyanna Lloyd Banwo, Sydney Darius (Read by), Wendell Manwarren (Read by)

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Author's Club First Novel Award 2023

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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.
This magical tale of a Trinidadian gravedigger searching for a father he never met proves we should believe the hype
Stella, Sunday Telegraph

About Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241994979
  • Length: 521 minutes
  • Price: £13.00
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