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Title details for When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo - Wait list

When We Were Birds

by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
ebook
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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.
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Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book

  • Release date: March 15, 2022

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780385547277
  • Release date: March 15, 2022

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9780385547277
  • File size: 1805 KB
  • Release date: March 15, 2022
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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Fantasy Fiction Literature

Languages

English

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.
Expand title description text
Fantasy Fiction Literature
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