H
ow do you follow a debut novel that was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, scooped Crime &
Thriller Book of the Year at The British Book Awards, was picked for two influential book clubs (Richard & Judy and Between the Covers), with international rights sold in 34 territories and total UK sales (according to her publisher, Atlantic) going on for half a million copies in all formats? The surprising answer, if you are
Oyinkan Braithwaite, is definitely not with a new crime novel. But when the Nigerian-British author speaks to me over video call from the US, where she is on holiday visiting extended family, she tells me she never thought of My Sister, the Serial Killer as a crime book in the first place: “When I was writing it, I didn’t really consider it crime you know… I just wanted to write a good story and to entertain the readers and for the story to be loved by the readers.” With her second novel, the much-anticipated Cursed Daughters, she says: “To be honest, I wanted to get as far away from My Sister, the Serial Killer as I could with this book, lest I box myself in.” Happily, for the legions of fans of My Sister,
the Serial Killer, both novels share a central theme. At the heart of her bestselling debut lay the relationship between two sisters – calm, unflappable nurse Korede and her fiery, murderous sibling Ayoola, with a habit of dispatching her unfortunate boyfriends and relying on Korede to (literally) clean up the mess. Cursed Daughters may have less bloodshed but it is just as interested in strong female familial relationships. Set in Lagos, it tells the story of the cursed
Falodun family. Once upon a time, Feranmi Falodun, a young and beautiful village-dweller, slept with another woman’s husband and became pregnant. When his wife, visiting from the city, found out, she cursed Feranmi and all her female descendants. The curse is this: “No man will call your house, home. And if they try, they will not have peace. Your daughters are cursed – they will pursue men, but the men will be like water in their palms…”
women: beautiful Monife, who drowns at the beginning of the novel; her sensible cousin Ebun and Ebun’s daughter Eniiyi, who the rest of the Falodun family believe is the reincarnation of Monife. The novel is told from their three viewpoints, moving back in time to the 1990s for Monife’s story and forward to the present day for Eniiyi’s. Each is cognisant that, according to the curse, if she falls in love, she will be unable to hold on to it. “The men would eventually leave them, no matter what they did. They would love in vain,” says Braithwaite. Cursed Daughters was born out of the
idea of “this family, these women who are fated to suffer and are trying to find a way to live, or to accept it, or to just decide how they are going to address this curse”. For the reader, there is also the question of whether Eniyii is the reincarnation of her dead aunt Monife, or not. This gives the novel its Gothic-tinged edge; there is a hospital scene, just after Ebun has given birth, to send a chill down the spine. The “mood” she wanted for the novel, she tells me, was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. With Monife/Eniyii, Braithwaite was
particularly interested in the idea of self- fulfilling prophecies. “If people keep telling you that you are one thing, are you that thing? Is it inevitable that you become that thing?” When Eniiyi falls in love with a handsome boy she saves from drowning, will she be the one to break the curse? And can she escape Monife’s watery fate? Braithwaite says she wanted Eniiyi to
feel “weighed down” by the curse “and always be trying to find a way out of it”. Eniiyi, a bright girl, is pursuing a career in genetics. “I wanted her to constantly be trying to push against the things that her family were pushing towards her.” Fittingly, for a story about family, Braithwaite’s
When I was writing My Sister, the Serial Killer, I didn’t really consider it crime… I just wanted to write a good story and to entertain the readers and for the story to be loved by the readers
From generation to generation, the
headstrong Falodun women have struggled to break the curse, their lives littered with heartbreak. Cursed Daughters follows three
dad is partly responsible for the novel seeing the light of day. She had tried to write a story about a cursed family “years ago”, but not got very far, and so the idea sat on her laptop, undeveloped. While she was pregnant, her dad started “harassing me to do the next novel and reminding me that it had been five years since My Sister, the Serial Killer”, she says, laughing. “He was just so on my case that eventually I thought, okay, you know what? Let me look through the stories I have. I was telling him each one and when I got to what would become Cursed Daughters, as I was talk- ing about it, it kept on moving and I thought, ‘hang on a minute, there’s something here, it seems to be working now’.” Cursed Daughters also touches on the
stories of the generation above, sisters Kemi (Ebun’s mother and Eniyii’s grandmother) and Bunmi (mother to Monife). The novel finds humour in the contrast between the beliefs of the “eccentric” older women and the younger members of the family. Among other things attributed to the curse
Key backlist
My Sister, the Serial Killer Atlantic Books, £9.99, 9781786495983
Braithwaite’s debut was a huge critical and commercial success. “A bombshell of a book… Sharp, explosive, hilarious,” said the New York Times. “Glittering and funny… A stiletto slipped between the ribs and through the left ventricle of the heart”, said the Financial Times.
190,401 TCM copies sold
The Baby Is Mine Atlantic Books, £7.99, 9781838952563
A Quick Reads novella. “Braithwaite excels at narrative voice, morally compromised characters and original, subversive plots… Part drama, part thriller, it is a gripping distillation of Braithwaite’s distinctive brand of comic domestic noir,” said the Evening Standard.
6,642 TCM copies sold
is Bunmi’s earlier abandonment by her husband, which she refuses to accept, forever consulting the spirits – and local spell provider Mama G – to lead her ex-husband back to her (despite the fact he lives in London with a new family) and Monife is eye-rollingly sceptical of her mother’s strange rituals. Meanwhile, Kemi is intent on snaring a fourth husband, the others never having ‘stuck’. “Nigeria is an interesting place,” says Braithwaite, “because in many ways it is a matriarchal society, but it’s also a patriarchal society. It’s a matriarchal society in the sense that [in] a lot of households, their moms were the foundation and the rock of those households. But it’s also a society where it’s very difficult to move with ease without a husband.” Amid the folklore and curses and
mysterious deaths, Cursed Daughters is also a love story, and that aspect of the novel was the hardest part, Braithwaite admits. “Writing romance is not a muscle I exercise, and it was hard. How do you write a romance that separates itself from all the romances that you’ve read or watched? Kudos to romance writers! It’s not easy… So, if people meet me and tell me they loved Monife and Golden Boy’s love or Eniyii and Zubby’s love – I will be very happy.”
07
AMAAL SAID
Books Author Profile
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