Discover the blazing debut novel from the Booker Prize winning author.

'A crazy ambidextrous delight' Michael Ondaatje

Where is Pradeep S. Mathew - spin bowler extraordinaire and 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'?

Retired sportswriter W. G. Karunasena is dying, and he wants to know.

W.G. will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down the mysterious Pradeep. On his quest he will also uncover a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

'Bristling with energy and confidence' Sunday Times

Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

**THE LOST LOVE SONGS OF BOYSIE SINGH - THE NEW NOVEL FROM INGRID PERSAUD - IS AVAILABLE NOW**

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE
AS SEEN ON BBC'S BETWEEN THE COVERS
ONE OF STYLIST'S BEST NEW BOOKS FOR 2020

'A beautiful book. I adored it.' RICHARD OSMAN
'Full of wit and soul.' TRACY CHEVALIER
'Unforgettable' MARLON JAMES
'It made me ugly cry' JESSIE BURTON
'Glorious' RACHEL JOYCE
'Spellbinding' ANDRÉ ACIMAN

Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love.

Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household. Happy in their differences, they build a home together. Home: the place keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world - until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart.

Brave and brilliant, steeped in affection, Love After Love offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back.

'Gorgeous and heartwrenching' CALEB AZUMAH NELSON, bestselling author of Small Worlds and Open Water

'What an electrifying and important debut. Every word is knife sharp, every emotion nuanced and every twist brilliantly turned . . . Should be at the top of everyone's 2026 Must Read list' RACHEL JOYCE, author of The Handmade God

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 sons 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 familys 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 weve closed the door on it.

***
'Tender, lyrical and strikingly assured, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levys Small Island. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history. Guardian
'An important novel that rises to the challenge of accountability and modern justice. McKenzie-Goddard writes with a commanding style, both measured and flamboyant' DIANA EVANS, author of the Women's Prize for Ficion shortlisted novel Ordinary People

A sharp, tender debut that traverses generations of one family YOMI SODE, award-winning author of Manorism

'Smallie . . . is both historical retrospective of the West Indian experience in Britain during the so-called Windrush era, as well as heartwarming exploration of love of self, family, community and country. It is a brilliant and deeply moving debut' CHERIE JONES, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

SHORLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS

'Dazzling' Cosmopolitan
'I deeply admire This One Sky Day - and also, not so secretly, bitterly envy it...' MARLON JAMES
'Gorgeous' Financial Times
'Haunting' Independent
'Wonderfully fearless' New Statesman
'Stunning' KEI MILLER

Dawn breaks across the archipelago of Popisho. The world is stirring awake again, each resident with their own list of things to do:

A wedding feast to conjure and cook
An infidelity to investigate
A lost soul to set free

As the sun rises two star-crossed lovers try to find their way back to one another across this single day. When night falls, all have been given a gift, and many are no longer the same.

The sky is pink, and some wonder if it will ever be blue again.

What readers are saying
'Brimming with and life and love and just absolutely gorgeous writing. a one-of-a-kind novel.'

'I couldn't put it down and I will be recommending it to everyone.'

'A story luxuriously and confidently told, which is sumptuous from sentence to sentence. There is both literal and literary magic here.'

'This book is bursting at the seams with beauty! Magic! Love! Imagination! It is a burst of colour and flame.'

'It's hard to explain, but if you love getting lost in a story, this could be one for you.'