Ayoola is looking at my reflection in the mirror. I stand up and rinse the gloves in the sink. But when Ayoola needs help getting rid of the body, Korede is ready with the bleach. One of them gets food poisoning and starts frothing at the mouth, another starts screaming at her so she stabs him with a knife in what she claims is self-defence. The novel that broke the dam is a fast-paced, deadpan story of two sisters: nurse Korede and her younger sister Ayoola, a beautiful clothing designer, who has a sizeable following on Instagram and whose boyfriends keep winding up dead. I just had high standards for myself.”Īs the end of 2017 approached, with her 30th birthday just around the corner, Braithwaite told herself she was being ridiculous: “Forget about the great novel, just write something for yourself that’s fun.” It wasn’t that she felt under pressure, she says, but after working for a publisher in Lagos, “you know what’s good and what’s not. Relaxing on a sofa in her bright yellow jumpsuit, sheepskin boots and green braids, her smile never far from a laugh, it’s hard to imagine Braithwaite paralysed by doubt. “So I let a year go by where I kept convincing myself I was going to write something fantastic, and I couldn’t.” “That was very exciting for me, but I didn’t have anything that I wanted to give them,” Braithwaite recalls. The agent Clare Alexander saw the Nigerian author’s submission and asked her if she had anything else.

The block had descended after her short story The Driver was shortlisted for the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story prize.

My sister the serial