Name: When We Were Birds
ISBN: 9780385547260

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

"The introduction of a singularly stunning new voice in fiction, Ayanna Gillian Lloyd's The Gatekeepers is a mythic love story set in contemporary Trinidad & Tobago about two young outsiders brought together by their connection with the dead"--

A Novel

When We Were Birds

I’ve struggled with this one. Picked it up after over a year, hoping maybe I’ll be able to make it through to the end this time. Unfortunately, the storytelling just didn’t click for me. I’ve decided to DNF.

Nana O

Sarah Sammis

The core story is the meeting of Darwin and Yejide. Darwin is a Rastafarian man who has cut his locks and moved to the big city to find work. The only work he can find is as a grave digger and security guard for the city's largest and oldest (and most haunted) cemetery. Yejide is one of a line of women whose calling in life is to help the recently departed cross over. As her mother has recently died, that role is now falling to Yejide, though she is somewhat ambivalent about her calling.

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Lara Engle

This was a slow burn, but Darwin and Yejide will stay with me for a long time. Lovely, magical, yet real.

Shona Tiger

This review first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, Issue 337, Mar 19, 2022.


Darwin is a young Rastafarian man who has lived a protected and isolated life with his mother in rural Trinidad. He has seen her financial struggles as a single mother, and has been looking for a job so he can assist her. He is offered a government job as a gravedigger in the large city of Port Angeles, but working with the dead is against his religion. He decides to take the job against his mother's wishes.

Yejide is the youngest of a line of "bird women", women who can communicate with the dead. She lives outside Port Angeles with her distant mother, and other members of her blended family. 
When her mother dies, Yejide comes into her powers, and has to take her place at the head of the family. She meets Darwin in a strange vision at the time of her mother's passing, and then physically, for the first time, at the cemetery, when she goes to arrange for her mother's burial. Their connection is immediate, and deep.

This is an exceptional first novel, a well-written ghost story, and a love story. Most of the action happens at the cemetery, where Darwin gets tangled up with a dangerous criminal gang. The interior lives of Yejide and Darwin are well-explored, and the dark elements of the story are genuinely spooky.

Banwo is from Trinidad and Tobago, and lives in London.

A mythic love story set in Trinidad & Tobago, Ayanna Gillian Lloyd's radiant debut introduces two unforgettable outsiders brought together by their connection with the dead. "You were never the smartest child, but even you should know that when a dead woman offers you a cigarette, the polite thing to do would be to take it. Especially when that dead woman is your mother." The St. Bernard women have lived in Morne Marie, the house on top of a hill outside Port Angeles, for generations. Built from the ashes of a plantation that enslaved their ancestors, it has come to shelter a lineage that is bonded by much more than blood. One woman in each generation of St. Bernards is responsible for the passage of the city's souls into the afterlife. But Yejide's relationship with her mother, Petronella, has always been contorted by anger and neglect, which Petronella stubbornly carries to her death bed, leaving Yejide unprepared to fulfill her destiny. 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 his ailing mother can no longer work and the only job he can find is gravedigging, he must betray the life she 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, Port Angeles' largest and oldest cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both. A masterwork of lush imagination and immersive lyricism, shot through with the rhythm of the island, When We Were Birds is a spellbinding novel about inheritance, loss and love's seismic power to heal.

When We Were Birds A Novel

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