Nigerian-British writer Oyinkan Braithwaite made her name in 2018 with My Sister, the Serial Killer, a sharp, darkly funny thriller that won international acclaim. In the foreword to her long-awaited and very different second novel, she writes: “Cursed Daughters is a story about three women deeply affected by a generational curse in their family, where all the women are destined to lose the men they love. It’s about generational trauma, about myth and superstition, and also about love.”
The novel opens on a Lagos beach, where 25-year-old Monife walks into the sea, into the realm of Mami Wata, the seductive water spirit said to dwell between the material and spiritual worlds. Her suicide sets the tone for a story steeped in superstition and guilt. On the day she is buried, her cousin Ebun gives birth to a daughter, Eniiyi, who looks so like the dead woman that “it was as though Monife had inserted herself back into their lives”, ensuring they would never know peace.
Told through the shifting perspectives of Monife, Ebun and Eniiyi, the story spans three decades, from 1994 to 2025. Generations earlier, an ancestor of the Falodun women had an affair with a married man. The wronged wife, humiliated and enraged, declared: “No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace.”
That pattern is unbroken. Bunmi, Monife’s mother, returns to Nigeria with her two children after her husband leaves her. She seeks help from a spiritual healer, Mama G, to “clear his eye” and win him back, “despite the fact that he had a new wife and two children under five, shacked up in what used to be their London home”.
Monife believes her fate will be different. A devoted reader of Mills & Boon, she falls for Kalu, so flawless in her eyes that she calls him “Golden Boy”. But when Kalu’s mother decides her son can do better, Monife’s world begins to crumble. Desperate to hold on, she too turns to Mama G’s charms.
Impulsive and romantic, determined to defy fate, Monife is ultimately undone by it. Ebun is the pragmatist, cautious and hardworking, determined not to follow in her cousin’s footsteps. Eniiyi, the modern sceptic, dismisses curses entirely. A student of genetics, she believes what passes between generations is biological, not spiritual. Yet when she rescues a man from drowning and falls in love, the past becomes impossible to ignore.
The family drama becomes a wider reflection on the stories families tell to explain their pain. The curse is both plot and metaphor, a potent symbol of inherited suffering passed from mother to daughter. This is a world where Christianity, science and traditional spirituality coexist uneasily. Ebun and Eniiyi may attend church on Sundays, but in moments of despair they turn to the babalawo, the traditional healer, for help.
Braithwaite captures this mix of beliefs without judgment, showing how people move between faiths when one system fails to provide answers. Lagos is vividly drawn. Chaotic and vibrant, it’s a city where ancient superstitions and modern life exist side by side.
Though Cursed Daughters contains touches of the supernatural, it’s not a ghost story. Braithwaite uses the curse as a metaphor for how old wounds echo through generations, influencing relationships long after their origins are forgotten. The Falodun curse, in other words, is less about magic and more about history repeating itself.
In the matrilineal family, identity and belonging are traced through the mother’s line. Women carry the weight of continuity and decision-making, a double-edged inheritance. Power and resilience coexist with expectation and duty. Each woman must confront not just the men who fail them, but also the stories they’ve been told about who they are and what they deserve. The curse becomes the residue of their silenced trauma.
Through Braithwaite’s layered storytelling, Cursed Daughters becomes an act of resistance. Each woman’s voice is unearthed and reworked into a collective story of endurance. Storytelling here is not catharsis but reclamation, an assertion that what is inherited is not only grief but also the power to rewrite the ending.
Her prose is plain and unshowy, and she still makes room for flashes of dry humour even in sorrow. In one scene, a character observes her devout mother: “She looked every bit the schoolteacher; you could almost forget she was fond of chanting to Yoruba spirits in the nude.”
If My Sister, the Serial Killer explored how far women will go to protect one another, Cursed Daughters asks what it takes to protect oneself. Braithwaite offers no easy redemption.
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