When We Were Birds
A Novel
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4.5 • 18 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A mythic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's radiant debut is a masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling—a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love's seismic power to heal.
"Roots the reader in [Trinidad’s] traditions and rituals [and] ... in the glorious matriarchy by which lineage is upheld. The result is a depiction of ordinary life that’s full and breathtaking."—The New York Times Book Review
In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out.
Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past, and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger.
Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A young couple struggles with the electrifying line between the living and the dead in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s stirring debut. Emmanuel Darwin has reluctantly abandoned his Rastafarian upbringing to begin working in a forbidden profession, taking a job as a gravedigger in a massive cemetery in Port Angeles, Trinidad. But the new gig is more dangerous than it seems, as he’s slowly drawn into the city’s nefarious criminal underworld, and into the arms of the beautiful Yejide St. Bernard—who can commune with the dead. We were enraptured as the couple fall madly and thrillingly in love—their story is like a masterclass in magical realism. (She first appears to him as a vision at the cemetery gates in the middle of a raging storm.) When We Were Birds proves that love can be found in the darkest and most hopeless of places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Banwo's moving and mythic debut, set in Trinidad and Tobago, a woman juggles a supernatural bond to her home and a whirlwind romance. Born in a large multigenerational house in Morne Marie, Yejide watches her mother, Petronella, recede from the world after the death of Petronella's twin sister, Geraldine; she lives in a near coma for a year before dying herself. Petronella then visits Yejide as a ghost and passes to her the ability to communicate with spirits that has been shared by generations of women in their family. Meanwhile, Emmanual Darwin leaves the countryside for the city of Port Angeles to take a job in the Fidelis cemetery. It's not the dead Darwin must fear, but the living, as his coworkers pull him into a scheme involving the disposal of bodies on behalf of politicians and other powerful men. Yejide and Darwin meet at Fidelis to prepare Petronella's grave for burial. More than love at first sight, their connection is strongly spiritual. Yejide is also attached to her home, and to the boarders in her mother's house who depend on her, so things get especially complicated when Darwin gets in trouble with his coworkers and they consider fleeing together. Banwo's stunning lyricism offers a window into her characters as well as a view of the landscape, as when Darwin heads to Port Angeles: "Easy to feel hopeful when the sky clear, the air have some leftover rain in it and the hills green and lush." The otherworldly setting instantly pulls the reader in. This remarkable debut should not be missed.
Customer Reviews
Very Well Written
The most creatively written novel I’ve read this year. I enjoyed every single page. I beg you not to pass this one up.