From Dominica’s restless sea to the cold winters of Toronto, Myrtle Sodhi’s gorgeous debut novel We’ve Been Here Before traces generations of one family's women whose lives are shaped by migration and the inheritance of memory. Told in lush, lyrical prose through the voices of Ma Lise-Rose, Dada, Francesca, and Margaux, the novel reveals that the past is never truly past — it is alive, insistent, and always reaching toward the present.
Carrianne Leung, author of Wonderland Road
We’ve Been Here Before takes you to places that are achingly familiar, even if you’ve never been there at all. From hope to heartache, from the salt air of Dominica’s villages to the damp boot smell of Toronto’s elementary schools, this sparkling debut brims with sensory richness. Sodhi’s mothers and daughters, and their generations of hard-won wisdom, will linger with you long after reading.
Genevieve Scott, author of The Damages
A haunting and at times surreal tale of family ties reminiscent of Edwidge Danticat and Toni Morrison that promises to transform readers even as it transports them to another time, Dominica, Toronto and back, and across generations. In We’ve Been Here Before, Sodhi tells a powerful story of the ties that bind women together despite trauma and seemingly insurmountable odds.
Kristin Moriah, author of Insensible of Boundaries
Sodhi plunges us into the imaginative landscape and dreamspace of the Caribbean, crafting an intergenerational epic that moves fluidly across time, place, and memory.
Camille Turner, artist and scholar
We’ve Been Here Before is both tender and unflinching — a tribute to the strength and resilience of Caribbean women and a testament to how that power endures and transforms across time.
Karen Turner, Caribbean arts practitioner and music historian