An Olive Grove in Ends

March 21, 2022
McKenzie’s beautiful debut, set in a predominantly British Jamaican neighborhood of Bristol, England, exhibits both a tenderness for the residents and an unflinching examination of their struggles. Sayon Hughes has fantasized since he was a child about owning a house outside the city. Despite early academic promise, Sayon has grown disillusioned after his school years with the almost impossible project of saving enough money through legitimate means, so, like several of his former classmates and relatives, he’s turned to dealing drugs. Then, Sayon kills a man who is assaulting his cousin Cuba. Wracked with guilt and the fear that his longtime girlfriend, Shona Jennings, will split if she finds out, he tries to go straight, moving into Shona’s parents’ house, only to encounter hypocrisy and cruelty from her pastor father. Questions of faith and its manifestations predominate in the novel’s second half, as Sayon grapples with whether to remain in the Christian church of his youth or to start anew with Islam. McKenzie renders the neighborhood’s rich and complicated social and familial networks as a study in contrasts, where violence and betrayal coexist with generosity and kindness. It’s a gorgeous debut that nurtures an unlikely sort of hope that’s predicated on countless losses.

April 15, 2022
Sayon is a Hughes, and in the Ends neighborhood of Bristol, that means he's not likely to amount to much. Raised alongside his extended family, he's grown accustomed to how the Hughes name follows him everywhere. Sayon is a young man now, just beginning to experiment with his identity outside the family. His girlfriend, Shona, comes from a more conservative, deeply religious background. Sayon is taken with Shona and her family, whose love for one another is exotic and endearing to him. Shona's wholesome existence is the opposite of Sayon's, which is marked by drug-dealing and drug-using family members, incarceration, and drama. When Shona's father, a pastor, witnesses Sayon involved with one such drama, he pledges to save Sayon's soul, so long as Sayon moves in with his family and vows to never speak to another Hughes ever again. Sayon's world turns upside down, and is so rich to inhabit. His family and conflicts are alive and dynamic on every page, a testament to Bristol-based debut novelist McKenzie's electrifying sense of voice.

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Starred review from March 15, 2022
Drug violence, religious strife, and a star-crossed romance play out in this Shakespearean tale set in a Bristol neighborhood of Caribbean and Somali immigrants called Ends. Born into a large, "infamous" family of Pentecostal preachers with Jamaican roots, Sayon Hughes, the young narrator of this debut novel, is mostly raised by his grandmother alongside his many cousins. Along with them, he has inherited "generations of trauma passed on by relatives" and intensified by "a system intent on keeping us in place." Drawn into the drug trade by his cousin Cuba, whom he considers his brother, Sayon is arrested for dealing and serves six months in jail. The sentence is one of many setbacks that threaten his relationship with the bright and upstanding Shona Jennings, a Baptist preacher's daughter and aspiring record-label owner whom he and everyone else assumes he'll marry. "If looks could kill she had a knife at my neck," he says. After being pushed into a shocking act of violence, Sayon is so afraid of Shona's finding out about the misdeed that he strikes a deal with her father, Pastor Lyle, who knows what happened but has his own dark secrets to keep. He won't tell his daughter about the incident if Sayon promises to cut ties with Cuba and the rest of his family, repent, and become born again while living in the Jennings house. There's no way that plan is going to work, but Pastor Lyle's open hatred of Muslim Somalis ultimately has a positive effect in awakening Sayon to Islam, a religion that makes sense to him. One of the many notable achievements of this remarkable debut by the 23-year-old McKenzie is to sustain our affection for Sayon even when he is acting badly. "Childhood and innocence are only synonymous to the privileged," he says. Recalling Zadie Smith's masterpiece White Teeth (2000), published when she was 25, this is the most exciting U.K. debut in years. A gritty coming-of-age tale for the ages.

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