[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Emma Loffhagen (The Guardian) reviews Smallie, a debut novel by Eden McKenzie-Goddard. Loffhagen writes, “In this warm and tender debut, the family of Barbados-born Lucinda must try to document her decades in Britain after the Home Office threatens her with deportation.” Read this incisive and touching review at The Guardian. [Also see our previous post New Book: Smallie.]
There is a particular kind of British cruelty that thrives on politeness. The 2018 Windrush scandal exposed this in full: rather than chaos or spectacle, it revealed a machinery of clinical decisions that stripped Black and brown people of their belonging with bureaucratic precision. It is now part of our national story, often spoken of in the abstract or invoked as a cautionary tale. But what can be obscured, in this telling, is the texture of the harm, the way complicated lives were reduced to paperwork.
Smallie, Eden McKenzie-Goddard’s tender debut, insists on restoring the humanity of those Windrush-generation immigrants who were erased by official language. The story begins decades before, in 1961, when 19-year-old Lucinda Brown leaves Barbados for England, in search of Clarence Braithwaite, the jazz musician who fathered her child (who stays in the care of her family) and then disappeared into the promises of Britain. On the boat crossing she meets Raldo, a magnetic Trinidadian – “the type of man women slap each other to point out” – whose easy charm hints at a freer life.
When she arrives in London, though, rather than romance, she finds disillusionment. The England she has been promised is cold and indifferent – on her first day, she is beaten by the police, her body absorbing the force of a system she does not yet understand. She shares a cramped room in Hackney with three other recent Caribbean arrivals, and works long hours as a cleaner. The dream of Clarence, too, quickly calcifies into a jarring reality. Reshaped by the harsh reality of immigrant Britain, he is brittle, volatile and increasingly unfaithful. “This is not my Clarence,” Lucinda realises. “This is not the land I was promised.”
Running alongside is the present-day storyline, when Lucinda receives a terse letter from the Home Office informing her that she is an illegal immigrant, due for removal. “They have given me six weeks to prepare to leave a life of more than 50 years.” Her children – particularly Patrick, a recovering alcoholic barely holding himself together – must reconstruct her life in documented form, proving her right to remain by filling in the gaps of a past that was never recorded properly in the first place. Their search leads back to Raldo, the man who might hold the missing piece of evidence, and the ghost of an alternative life.
This dual structure allows McKenzie-Goddard to juxtapose the granular, intimate details of Lucinda’s life with the cold, abstract logic of the state. A woman who has spent decades working, raising children, building a home, can be reduced in an instant to an unwanted administrative error. “A grandmother. Seventy-five. A cage,” her son Mark says, referring to the removal van Lucinda is forced into. “Where is the justice?” [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/may/18/smallie-by-eden-mckenzie-goddard-review-the-stories-behind-the-windrush-scandal
[Photo of Eden McKenzie-Goddard (detail here) by Richard Barr/RICHBARRPHOTO.]
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Emma Loffhagen (The Guardian) reviews Smallie, a debut novel by Eden McKenzie-Goddard. Loffhagen writes, “In this warm and tender debut, the family of Barbados-born Lucinda must try to document her decades in Britain after the Home Office threatens her with deportation.” Read this
