Published 7th May 2026 by Viking.
From the cover of the book:
Smallie adj. |smal·lie|
Definition: Caribbean (informal). Describing or relating a person from a small island; a small islander.
In 1961, nineteen-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her son’s father, Clarence Braithwaite, who left Barbados to join the British army. But aboard the ship to Southampton she meets a man named Raldo who offers her a glimpse of a new life, a freer life. Bound by the memory of her son waiting at home, she chooses Clarence – realizing too late that war has made a stranger out of him.
Nearly fifty years later, Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that threatens to tear her world apart. Her children rally together to prove her legal arrival, and to do so they must track down an elusive man from her past, a man she wanted to love but instead lost, a man who now holds the key to her family’s future. Raldo . . .
An exhilarating and expansive tale of a family thrown into collision with the Windrush scandal, Smallie shows just how easily the past can spill into our lives, even when – especially when – we think we’ve closed the door on it.
***********
1961. Nineteen-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England, searching for Clarence Braithwaite, the man whose promise of love resulted in the young son she has left behind in the care of her grandmother. Clarence had left Barbados to join the British army, leaving her to raise Reggie alone. All she knows is that he is now living in a place called Tottenham.
On the journey she meets a man called Raldo, who offers her the chance of a different kind of life, but shaped by her upbringing with a strict father she believes her future lies with Clarence - only to realise too late that he has been changed by his experiences fighting in Kenya, and is no longer the person she fell in love with.
2015. Years later, an unhappy marriage to Clarence has resulted in a family filled with tension. Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that shakes her to the core - she has been deemed to have no legal right to remain in the UK, despite arriving in England on a British passport and long-service as an NHS employee. Her family rallies round to help fight her case, but evidence she travelled here before the cut-off date for automatic citizenship for Commonwealth residents is elusive. Only one person can provide the proof they need - Raldo - and Lucinda has not seen him since the day they said goodbye in 1962.
This beautifully written and many-layered debut novel is a compelling combination of family drama and powerful examination of the shocking Windrush scandal of recent years. The story unfurls in two compelling timelines, following Lucinda's arrival in England in 1961, and the fall-out of the letter she receives in 2015.
The story weaves beautifully between the timelines, delving into expansive story-lines about broken promises on an international, institutional and personal level, as the Windrush generation face betrayal in the past and the present. Lucinda's heart-rending first person account of her upbringing, meeting with Raldo, reunion with Clarence, and the choices she makes are an utterly compelling account of life for a Smallie (small islander) in the 1960s. In parallel, the incisive contemporary drama in the present addresses the shameful treatment of so many people like Lucinda, when political point-scoring rides rough-shod over their lives.
This is a novel of intense moments that hit you hard, with a high proportion of tear-jerking human frailty and whopping injustice, but there are golden moments that will make you cry for more positive reasons too. I am seriously impressed with the way Mckenzie-Goddard writes so well about complicated families and tricky relationships against the wider backdrop of the Windrush scandal - and he threads a very clever vein of mystery through the whole wonderful lot that only reveals its significance right at the climax of the story.
If you love a novel that captures you heart and soul, and leaves you with a lot to think about when it comes to uncomfortable history, then this is the debut you need. I could not put it down until I had absorbed it cover to cover!
Smallie is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to Viking for sending me a proof of this book.
About the author:
Eden McKenzie-Goddard is a writer with Barbadian-Jamaican roots. Smallie is his first novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment