Book Review - Cursed Daughters
Nigerian-British author Oyinkan Braithwaite’s mordant first novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018), achieved that rare balance of commercial and critical acclaim. It 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 at the British Book Awards. Like her debut, Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is strong on female kinship and intergenerational trauma. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, ever 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. The novel opens with Monife’s suicide by drowning, and reconstructs what led to her death, and how her younger cousin Ebun was implicated in her decisio...