Published by Atlantic Books, 2025, 340 pages
Feranmi Falodun, a beautiful young woman, seduces a man who comes to her village. In the morning, her father demands that the man provide a bride price for his daughter. The man agrees and buys her a house. But, sometime later, when the man’s wife insists on seeing the house and realizes that he had bought it for another woman, she curses Feranmi and all the women who come from her: daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters: “No man will call your house home. …Your daughters are cursed—they will pursue men, but men will be like water in their palms. Your granddaughters will love in vain. … Your daughters, your daughters’ daughters and all the women to come will suffer for man’s sake.”
This curse endures through the generations. No woman of the Falodun family has any luck with men. The sisters Bunmi and Kemi, born six generations after Feranmi, live together in Lagos in the house their grandfather built, with six bedrooms so his daughters will always have a place to live (as an acknowledgement of the curse). It is now divided into the west wing (Bunmi’s) and east wing (Kemi’s). Bunmi had married and moved with her husband to the UK. When he left her for another woman, she returned to Nigeria with her daughter Monife. Kemi’s daughter Ebun lives with them—Kemi has been through four husbands and is determined to beat the curse by marrying often and making sure the men provide for her household.
The women at the centre of the book are Monife and Ebun, and Ebun’s daughter Eniiyi. Monife is the older one, and Ebun’s life changes when she and Bunmi move into the house. The two girls become very close. Until Monife falls deeply in love with Kalu, whom she calls Golden Boy. Kalu is from a wealthy family, and his mother does not think Monife is good enough for him—she wants him to marry someone from their own milieu. This causes a rift between the couple, which finally leads to Monife walking into the ocean to take her own life.
Her mother might have hidden all of Monife’s pictures after her death, but Monife’s spirit is very much present. And when Ebun has her daughter Eniiyi, the child is exactly like Monife. The resemblance is startling, and as she grows up, Monife appears in Eniiyi’s dreams, always by the beach.
Then Eniiyi falls in love, and it looks like history might repeat itself. Is she going to follow in her aunt’s footsteps or will she be the one to finally break the curse?
Like Monife, the curse haunts the book. The story of the five women is interspersed with short chapters on the women in the family who were cursed, starting with Feranmi, women who were unable to keep their men. Maybe it is a curse, or maybe knowing that they were cursed somehow led them to lose their men.
What I loved most about it was the way Oyinkan Braithwaite captures the women’s relationships, whether as sisters, cousins, or mothers and daughters: the closeness and love, the quarrels and resentments, and the fact that there is so much you do not know about those who are closest to you. Ebun reacts to the curse by refusing to fall in love, and trying to protect her daughter both from the curse and from Monife by telling her as little as possible. Eniiyi is burdened by her resemblance to Monife and the fact that her grandaunt insists that she is her daughter reincarnated. Monife, who knows more about the curse than her cousin, is convinced that Golden Boy will help her break it. When he abandons her, it feels like a repeat of her beloved father’s abandonment of her and her mother.
I found this book impossible to put down and ended up reading late into the night. The characters stayed with me long after I finished reading it.
