Smallie

In 1961, 19-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her lover, Clarence Braithwaite, a jazz musician who left Barbados to join the British army. Aboard the ship to Southampton, Lucinda meets Raldo, a free-wheeling Trinidadian, who offers her the wild freedom that both her old life in Barbados and the life that awaits her in Britain lack. Driven by loyalty, and the memory of the little boy she left behind, she chooses Clarence – though soon realises that he is no longer the saxophonist she fell in love with, but a veteran at war with himself.

Fifty years later, Patrick Braithwaite, a father, husband, business owner and recovering alcoholic from Tottenham, has to rally his three siblings when their mother receives a letter from the Home Office that tears their life apart. They need to prove their mother’s legal arrival, to prevent her deportation, and to do that they need to find a man their mother once loved, known only by the name of Raldo…

Tender, rich and big-hearted, Smallie is a stunning British debut about three generations of a Bajan-British family affected by the Windrush scandal that will move, enrage and pull you in.