Author Event with Celeste Mohammed

An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family.

• Date: Monday 20 October
• Time: 12.30pm
• Venue: Sevenoaks Bookshop, 147 High Street, Sevenoaks, TN13 1XJ

'What a skilfully-woven set of connected stories, teeming with characters so lively they jump off the page. A beautiful mixture of folklore, history, the intimate pattern of family relationships, and a meditation of what it means for women, over generations, to love, endure, and grow.' Eleanor Shearer

'What is remarkable about Celeste Mohammed's book is how she creates vibrant characters from the thin threads of history. The women, beginning with the young Indian widow Jayanti all choose life over death but there is a price for freedom and it will be paid over many generations. All of Jayanti's descendants over the next hundred years want love and freedom, Salma and Yaz, Anand, Nadia and Abby, all dream of a good life but it is too early for the descendants of the indentured. Mohammed writes in a rich and vivid language where myth and gods cross the oceans all the way to Trinidad where they acquire a Caribbean sensitivity. The Mohammed-Gopaul family suffers yet their spirit endures.' Isabelle Dupuy

'Ever Since We Small is a rich and captivating novel-in-stories, with beguiling characters and an emotional pull that made me want to swallow the book whole. Celeste Mohamed is a wise and consummate storyteller.' Jendella Benson

Ever Since We Small

Celeste Mohammed's second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small, is a family saga which covers a sweeping landscape from the days of the British Raj in India, to multicultural modern Trinidad. Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavours of Trinidad kriol, the book follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, after her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured labourer in the Caribbean.

Jayanti's grandson, Lall Gopaul, seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life. His son, Shiva, is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache follows for their three children - Anand, Nadya and Abby - 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 Gopauls' 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.

Celeste Mohammed

Celeste has been a lawyer since 2001 but she has been telling stories all her life. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, in 2016, she graduated from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction). Celeste's goal is to dispel all myths about island-life and island-people, and to showcase the musicality and resonance of Trinidadian creole (kriol). Her work has appeared in The New England Review, Litmag, Epiphany, The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She was also awarded the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John D Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction.

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