Below is the complete list of Oyinkan Braithwaite books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Standalone Books
- Cursed Daughters (2025)
Published in 2025, Cursed Daughters is listed as book #2 in the Standalone series.
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Hush Books
About Oyinkan Braithwaite
Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter whose fiction combines dark humor with complicated family loyalties, violence, superstition, love, and the expectations placed on women. She became internationally known through My Sister, the Serial Killer, a sharply compressed novel about two Lagos sisters bound together by affection, resentment, and an increasingly alarming succession of dead boyfriends. Her later work has moved beyond crime fiction while retaining the economical prose, uneasy comedy, and fascination with female relationships that made her debut distinctive.
Braithwaite was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and spent parts of her childhood in both Nigeria and the United Kingdom. She studied Creative Writing and Law at Kingston University before working in publishing, including as an assistant editor at the Nigerian publishing house Kachifo Limited. She also worked as a production manager for a children’s education and entertainment company and later as a freelance writer and editor. Before her breakthrough as a novelist, she wrote short fiction and poetry and was recognized in Nigeria’s spoken-word scene.
My Sister, the Serial Killer appeared in 2018 and introduced Korede, a meticulous nurse whose beautiful younger sister Ayoola has an inconvenient habit of killing the men she dates. Korede repeatedly helps clean up the consequences, but her loyalty is tested when Ayoola becomes interested in a doctor for whom Korede herself has feelings. The novel avoids becoming either a conventional serial-killer thriller or a simple satire. Its real tension comes from the sisters’ unequal relationship, family history, beauty standards, gender expectations, and the question of how far loyalty should extend when love becomes complicity.
The book brought Braithwaite major international recognition. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, while also winning the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. Its success led to translations in numerous languages and adaptations in other forms, including a Ballet Black production.
Braithwaite followed it with The Baby Is Mine, a short novel written for the Quick Reads literacy initiative. Set during the COVID-19 lockdown in Lagos, it places Bambi in the home of his recently deceased uncle, where two women are arguing over which of them is the mother of an infant. The confined setting turns uncertainty over the child’s identity into a tense domestic struggle involving grief, deception, jealousy, and competing versions of the truth.
Her shorter fiction includes Treasure, published as part of the multi-author Hush collection. Braithwaite has also written stories for outlets and platforms including McSweeney’s and Audible, demonstrating an interest in compact forms alongside her longer fiction.
Her second full-length novel, Cursed Daughters, appeared in 2025. Rather than repeating the crime framework of her debut, Braithwaite turned toward a multigenerational Nigerian family story shaped by a supposed curse condemning the women of the Falodun family to romantic unhappiness. Eniiyi grows up believing she may be the reincarnation of her dead cousin Monife, forcing questions of destiny, family mythology, religion, inherited trauma, and personal choice into her search for an independent identity.
The shift between the two novels reveals the breadth of Braithwaite’s interests. Murder gave My Sister, the Serial Killer its provocative premise, but family was always its real subject. Cursed Daughters makes that concern even clearer, examining how women inherit not only genes and traditions but stories about who they are expected to become. Across her relatively compact bibliography, Braithwaite has proved particularly skilled at exposing the dark, funny, and sometimes destructive obligations hidden inside the idea of family loyalty.