Three jinxed daughters in Oyinkan Braithwaite's cursed tale

Nigerian-British writer Oyinkan Braithwaite has followed up her smash-hit debut novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer (2018), with Cursed Daughters, another tense, thrilling page-turner.

- Myle Yan Tay

"Then, it affected my friendships, it affected my family." The book's structure mirrors this. He finds the death of his father in 2022, referenced towards the end of the book, unintentionally foreshadowed in some of his earlier pandemic poems. The 84-year-old's physical condition had been steadily deteriorating from old age, but it was only at the hospital that doctors found he had been infected.

"How did he get Covid-19? He's in the room all day. That remained a mystery." The randomness of infections inspired a poem titled OTOT TOTO.

Gwee, who had been experimenting with haikus for a decade, found himself writing and reading intensely during the Covid-19 years. The trauma of the period ended his haiku phase. "The words were coming out in a different way."

Each chapter has an epigraph taken from a book he read during the pandemic, ranging from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the Epic Of Gilgamesh to Singapore author Khir Johari's The Food Of Singapore Malays.

The title alludes to a line in French director Alain Resnais' 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, with a screenplay by French author Marguerite Duras that also reckons with the turning away from horrific events like the United States bombing of the Japanese city during WWII and France's harsh treatment of women who were seen to have collaborated with the Germans.

Gwee says these rich allusions were in part because there was a need during isolation to remember the poems and songs that had shaped him. "Society was not there to constantly tell you or put you in an understanding of who you are, so you try to remember. You find you suddenly need to deal with fragments of yourself, to know yourself better."

Look How We've Already Forgotten is probably as close to a novel as he will ever have the patience to write.