Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite
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.
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About Oyinkan Braithwaite
Oyinkan Braithwaite is the best-selling author of CURSED DAUGHTERS (2025) and MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER (2018).
CURSED DAUGHTERS was selected as a Read with Jenna pick and a Book of the Month pick. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Nero Book Awards and Longlisted for the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award.
MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER has been translated into 30 languages and sold millions of copies. It won the 2019 LA Times Award for Best Crime Thriller, the 2019 Morning News Tournament of Books, the 2019 Amazon Publishing Reader’s Award for Best Debut Novel and the 2019 Anthony Award for Best First Novel. It was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, among several other prizes, and longlisted for both the Booker Prize 2019 and the 2020 Dublin Literary Award.
Oyinkan has published several short stories over the last few years for a variety of publications and platforms, including Audible and McSweeney’s. She also wrote a novella The Baby is Mine in support of adult literacy. Alongside her work as a novelist, she is also a screenwriter with two projects in development for television and one for feature film, the latter an adaptation of her first novel.