Eden McKenzie-Goddard

Tender, lyrical and strikingly assured, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but reframed with the hindsight of just how fragile belonging is, and how easily it can be withdrawn. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history

What an electrifying and important debut. Every word is knife sharp, every emotion nuanced and every twist brilliantly turned. This devastating account of the Windrush scandal should be at the top of everyone's 2026 Must Read list

With Smallie, Eden Mckenzie-Goddard has given us a novel that will easily be one of the most important literary texts in British history. The voices are alive, and the characters feel so easily realised that they could stroll off the first few pages. With humour, love, pain and cultural connectedness, Eden has created a world that will resonate beyond the historic events that it chronicles.

Smallie is a beautiful rendering of an often-forgotten generation. With tenderness and a careful pen, McKenzie-Godard documents intimacies, not just of the Windrush scandal but the generations of those affected. Take time with this gorgeous and heartwrenching book, it is a thing to be savoured

Smallie is the poignant and powerful story of what happens when Barbados-born Lucinda Brown is ordered to leave Britain, where she has lived, loved and raised a family since 1961. It is both historical retrospective of the West Indian experience in Britain during the so-called ‘Windrush’ era, as well as heartwarming exploration of love of self, family, community and country. It is a brilliant and deeply moving debut

Cherie Jones, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

An enlightening and beautifully crafted story

JJ Bola, author of Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined

It is not too often that the significance of someone's work strikes you between the eyes from the first page, but this is what Eden has achieved with Smallie... Smallie reminds us of what it means to unite in powerlessness and how our futures often rest in the palms of the unjust. Told with stunning language and underlining the plight of the Windrush generation in the UK, this novel is one that will live with me indefinitely.

Onyi Nwabineli, author of Allow Me to Introduce Myself

With Smallie, McKenzie-Goddard has achieved a paradoxical feat: making a singular type of pain feel indisputably collective without sacrificing each unique aspect of such a dangerous time in recent history. Emotive, careful and wearing, McKenzie-Goddard’s grasp of language is just as strong as the effect this outstanding debut will have on every reader

Ore Agbaje-Williams, author of The Three of Us

A sharp, tender debut that traverses generations of one family

Yomi Sode, award-winning author of MANORISM

An important novel that rises to the challenge of accountability and modern justice. McKenzie-Goddard writes with a commanding style, both measured and flamboyant

Eden McKenzie-Goddard has a beautiful way with words. Tender, poignant and richly observed, Smallie honours the lives and stories shaped by one of Britain’s most painful injustices, while capturing home, memory and community with warmth and care. A stunning debut from an exciting new writer to watch – and my favourite read of 2026 so far

Despite the heaviness of its subject matter, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. McKenzie-Goddard’s prose is lyrical without becoming overwrought, and strikingly assured for a debut... In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but reframed with the hindsight of just how fragile belonging is, and how easily it can be withdrawn. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history.

Smallie adj. |smal·lie| 
Definition: Caribbean (informal). Describing or relating a person from a small island; a small islander. 
 
In 1961, nineteen-year-old Lucinda Brown travels to England in search of her son’s father, Clarence Braithwaite, who left Barbados to join the British army. But aboard the ship to Southampton she meets a man named Raldo who offers her a glimpse of a new life, a freer life. Bound by the memory of her son waiting at home, she chooses Clarence – realizing too late that war has made a stranger out of him. 
 
Nearly fifty years later, Lucinda receives a letter from the Home Office that threatens to tear her world apart. Her children rally together to prove her legal arrival, and to do so they must track down an elusive man from her past, a man she wanted to love but instead lost, a man who now holds the key to her family’s future. Raldo . . . 
 
An exhilarating and expansive tale of a family thrown into collision with the Windrush scandal, Smallie shows just how easily the past can spill into our lives, even when – especially when – we think we’ve closed the door on it.

Eden McKenzie-Goddard

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