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An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through several generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, Ever Since We Small is a sweeping epic that takes us from the days of the British Raj in India to multicultural modern Trinidad.
Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavors of Trinidad kriol, Ever Since We Small follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, following her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured laborer in the Caribbean. The generational after-effects of this decision are seen in the lives of Jayanti's grandson, Lall, who seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but instead becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life, and sis son, Shiva, who is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache then follows for their three children, who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example.
Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the family's inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.
"Mohammed beautifully captures the rhythm and music of Trinidadian patois...Readers will be deeply affected." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Drawing upon both historical realities and folkloric tradition, Ever Since We Small is a compelling novel built on a tapestry of fractured legacies and spectacular resilience." —Foreword (starred review)
"Celeste Mohammed's sophomore offering, Ever Since We Small, is an astonishing accomplishment. This slender, yet epic tale spans generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family and serves as a timely indictment of the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean. It is a critical and necessary book for those interested in understanding how the past wrestles with our present moment, and why hope is our most transcendental inheritance." —Cleyvis Natera, award-winning author of Neruda on the Park and The Grand Paloma Resort
"Ever Since We Small raises powerful nuanced questions: What does it mean to carry forward the memory of a people? Where does duty end and desire begin? And how do women shape their own lives in the shadows of history? This is a book about many things, foremost among them a tale of lives bound by blood and silence, a story that unearths the emotional aftermath of tragedies, threading it with the intimate, often unspoken realities of motherhood, longing, and survival. A sweeping, necessary novel on what it means to be human." —Krystal A. Sital, author of Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad
This information about Ever Since We Small was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Celeste Mohammed is the author of the novel-in-stories Pleasantview, which won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction has been recognized with numerous awards, including the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the John D. Gardner Memorial Prize. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her writing has also been featured in Daughters of Latin America (Amistad, 2023), an acclaimed anthology celebrating the voices of Afro-Latin and Caribbean women.She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Celeste lives in Trinidad.
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