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.

BIO

Celeste Mohammed is a Trinidadian lawyer-turned-writer and the author of “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.

REVIEWS

“Mohammed beautifully captures the rhythm and music of Trinidadian patois…Readers will be deeply affected.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Drawing upon both historical realities and folkloric tradition, Ever Since We Small is a compelling novel built on a tapestry of fractured legacies and spectacular resilience.” -- Foreword (starred review)

“Celeste Mohammed’s sophomore offering, Ever Since We Small, is an astonishing accomplishment. This slender, yet epic tale spans generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family and serves as a timely indictment of the legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean. It is a critical and necessary book for those interested in understanding how the past wrestles with our present moment, and why hope is our most transcendental inheritance.” -- Cleyvis Natera, award-winning author of Neruda on the Park and The Grand Paloma Resort

“Ever Since We Small raises powerful nuanced questions: What does it mean to carry forward the memory of a people? Where does duty end and desire begin? And how do women shape their own lives in the shadows of history? This is a book about many things, foremost among them a tale of lives bound by blood and silence, a story that unearths the emotional aftermath of tragedies, threading it with the intimate, often unspoken realities of motherhood, longing, and survival. A sweeping, necessary novel on what it means to be human.” -- Krystal A. Sital, author of Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad

[P]  Ig Publishing  /  January 13, 2026

0.8" H x 8.2" L x 5.4" W (0.75 lbs) 224 pages