Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

The author's first book, which was long listed for the Booker prize, was more violent and grizzly than this one, which overall is a good thing I think. That is a sibling tale--one sister kills her abusive boyfriend, the other one cleans up the mess. In this one but there is still a family mess to mop up. This time, the problem is spiritual rather than forensic: a matrilineal curse. For generations, the women of the Falodun family have been unlucky in matters of sustained love. They find love alright– but it curdles. Marriages disintegrate; husbands cheat, or die, or disappear. And so the women return home to Lagos, rejoin their spinster kin and teach their fatherless daughters to brace themselves for betrayal. We follow the intertwined fates of three curse-bearers. There is Monife, who dies by her own hand in the novel’s opening pages, but lingers in otherworldly ways; her cousin Ebun, who becomes a mother on the day Monife is buried; and Eniiyi, Ebun’s daughter, whose resemblance to Monife is so uncanny there is talk of reincarnation. Skipping back and forth in time, the novel zones in on each young woman as she grapples with the family jinx. It is a well told tale of what amounts to generational trauma.