Name: Offsite: Oyinkan Braithwaite: Cursed Daughters w/ Lovia Gyarkye
Start: 2025-11-19T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-11-19T20:00:00-05:00
Location: First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn

$Offsite: Oyinkan Braithwaite: Cursed Daughters w\/ Lovia Gyarkye$

"This is a taut, feverish novel that burns itself into you. Impossible to put down." —Abi Daré, New York Times bestselling author
About this Event

Event guidelines:

Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
A signing will follow the talk.
Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
The event will also be livestreamed for free on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/OdK7gKsSFZ0
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition from the author of the smash hit My Sister, the Serial Killer (“A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious'—New York Times)

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: New York Times, Washington Post, People, Goodreads, E! News, Kirkus, LitHub, Book Riot

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.

There is also the matter of the family curse: “No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace...” which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof.

When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?

Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With its unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.

Oyinkan Braithwaite is the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised there and in the UK. She currently lives in London with her family.

Lovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture. Previously, she was a film critic at The Hollywood Reporter and an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Aperture. She teaches in the arts and culture program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.