When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a magical realist novel set in Trinidad about Yejide, a woman from a family that guides the dead to the afterlife, and Darwin, a young man who becomes a gravedigger. Their lives intersect in a cemetery where corruption and spiritual forces blur the line between the living and the dead. As they fall in love, they are drawn into a world of ancestral duty, myth, and supernatural consequences.