Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is about intergenerational trauma and female kinship. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, since an ancestor’s affair with a married man provoked the vengeful wife to declare that the woman and her female descendants would never prosper in love: “men will be like water in their palms.”   Setting her story between 1994 and the present day, Braithwaite braids together the fates of three women bound by the curse.

A young woman must shake off a family curse, and widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition from Braithwaite whose first novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer ( 2018),  was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and won the 2020 Crime and Thriller Book of the Year category at the British Book Awards.

Cursed Daughters opens with Monife’s suicide by drowning, and reconstructs what led to her death and how her cousin Ebun was implicated in her decision. After the Funeral Ebun gives birth to Eniiyi, whose startling resemblance to the deceased prompts several family members to believe she is her reincarnation.  The Falodun woman may rule the roost at home, but they must navigate a patriarchal society. Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers, they repeat the same mistakes. After Bunmi, Monife’s mother, is left by her husband, she returns to Nigeria with her two children and seeks out the dubious skills of spiritual healer and herbalist Mama G to “clear his eye” and win him back, “despite the fact that he had a new wife and two children under five, shacked up in what used to be their London home”.

When Eniiyi falls in lovewith the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?

The characters of Cursed Daughters asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.

Cursed Daughters by Oyinken Braithwaite, Atlantic Books £18.99/ Penguin Random House $29, 384 pages.