When We Were Birds

DEBUT Set in a beautifully rendered alternate-universe Trinidad and Tobago, this first novel is a wonderfully crafted love story detailing the relationship between two young Trinidadians, Yejide and Darwin. The couple meet at Fidelis, a cemetery in the bustling city of Port Angeles where Yejide has come to inquire about specific burial rites for her mother. Darwin has reluctantly taken a job there as a gravedigger, which is in conflict with his Rastafarian upbringing and has also introduced him to a criminal enterprise involving his coworkers’ use of the Fidelis grounds for ill-gotten gains. Banwo enriches the story of the couple’s romance by introducing a magic realist element: Yejide’s calling, inherited from her mother, is to escort the dead toward the afterlife, assisted by corbeaux, or black vultures. It is not a destiny that Yejide has accepted readily.