Episode 34 | Wild Fires - Sophie Jai (Trinidad & Tobago)

BCLF Cocoa Pod

Grief is like an inside joke: you have to have been there to really get it.

Everything Cassandra Rampersad knows about her family history has been overheard: whispered behind a closed door or written in a notebook stowed away. Cassandra has always been curious, and when a death in the family means she has to return home to Toronto, it seems like the perfect opportunity to finally discover what it is that no one else will talk about.

But uncovering the past will never be easy when it has stayed hidden for so long. And with every new revelation, Cassandra realises that there is a reason that her family has never been good at grieving…

A powerful meditation on memory and loss, Wild Fires is a beautifully crafted novel from a stunning new literary voice.

Sophie Jai’s debut novel WILD FIRES was the winner of the 2019 Borough Press x The Good Literary Agency Prize. The novel is shortlisted for 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was longlisted for the 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. Jai has been a Writer-in-Residence & Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford and an Artist-in-Residence at Sangam House in India. She is an alumna of the Humber School for Writers where she studied under Olive Senior. She is currently working on her second novel of short stories at the University of Oxford.