Ever Since We Small

An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through several generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, Ever Since We Small is a sweeping epic that takes us from the days of the British Raj in India to multicultural modern Trinidad.

Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavors of Trinidad kriol, Ever Since We Small follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, following her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured laborer in the Caribbean. The generational after-effects of this decision are seen in the lives of Jayanti's grandson, Lall, who seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but instead becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life, and sis son, Shiva, who is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache then follows for their three children, 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 family's 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 is the author of the novel-in-stories Pleasantview, which won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction has been recognized with numerous awards, including the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the John D. Gardner Memorial Prize. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her writing has also been featured in Daughters of Latin America (Amistad, 2023), an acclaimed anthology celebrating the voices of Afro-Latin and Caribbean women.She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Celeste lives in Trinidad.