Trinidad-born, UK-based novelist Ingrid Persaud’s last book, the Costa Award-winning Love After Love, sparked intense discussions. Time after time, whenever I mentioned this 2020 book to anyone, the chat would inevitably turn to the famous — or infamous, depending on how you look at it — ending. There’s something about Persaud’s writing, or perhaps compelling writing in general, that demands a conversation.
Some of the best literary criticism out there takes on a conversational air, as though the critic were chatting with readers. Inspired by all of this, I asked acclaimed Trinidadian writers Caroline Mackenzie and Breanne Mc Ivor, themselves the authors of the rip roaring novels One Year of Ugly and The God of Good Looks, respectively, to engage in not a review but rather a dialogue about Persaud’s latest offering, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, a book whose title might, for some readers, bring to mind Trinidadian poet Anson Gonzalez’s haunting poem sequence ‘The Love Song of Boysie B’. Their conversation was conducted over a period of days in early June.
Andre Bagoo
Managing Editor, Moko
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CAROLINE MACKENZIE: Hello, my friend!
BREANNE MC IVOR: Hey, Caro!
CM: OK, so we’re here to discuss The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, by one of our fellow Trinis, Ingrid Persaud. I don’t know about you, Bree, but when I first heard who this book was going to be about, I was immediately intrigued. I mean: the story of the Al Capone of Trinidad, set in the Twenties and Thirties?! Hell yes. Such a smart choice to focus on a figure whose life was filled with meaty material to write about, but also whose persona is an urban myth in Trinidad. You hear that name and it immediately sparks a reaction—at least for Trinis.
What did you think about Ingrid’s choice to spotlight Boysie, and her handling of historical fiction?
BM: I loved it! And I especially loved that Boysie wasn’t the narrator. It would have been so easy to write a guns-blazing gangster story where the women were supporting characters and Boysie was the star—the Rajah. But through the four female storytellers, we see the vulnerabilities behind Boysie’s bravado and the different faces he wears in public and in private.
Also, having four narrators centres not just a female experience but many female experiences. We see Boysie – and Trinidad – through the lens of a sex worker-cum-businesswoman, a mother and homemaker, a rum shop owner, and an upwardly mobile red woman. In some ways, the history of the Caribbean is the history of silenced voices and fiction like this gives these people a voice.
Speaking of voice, what do you think about how the novel was written? For me, the writing was reminiscent of that Caribbean tradition of oral storytelling.
CM: I loved the conversational storytelling style. It really kept me engaged and kept the pacing quick. As for the decision to use Creole English, I’m always rooting for the presentation of our stories using language that is authentic to us, but it’s so challenging to get it exactly right. There’s such a rhythm and flow to our speech patterns, and I find it rare to read work that doesn’t contain a few stumbling blocks in its attempt to capture those patterns. Our pronunciation is also a nightmare to accurately represent in print. Think of it: “What is that?” would be phonetically transcribed as “Waza?” if we wanted to be completely accurate. So yeah, it can be difficult to capture it in a way that’s true-to-life while also being accessible to a foreign audience.
BM: It’s definitely tricky, but I think Ingrid handled it so well! I’m not a huge audiobook listener, but this novel seems made for the format.
Anyway Caro, I’m dying to talk about my favourite part of writing—character! Who’s your favourite?
CM: I thought Popo was a fantastic character. Definitely very memorable for me. Though I know the prostitute-with-street-smarts-and-a-heart-of-gold is a bit of a trope, I didn’t think Popo came across as two-dimensional or predictable. I’m not sure of the extent to which the details of her character are based on historical fact, but Ingrid crafted her as a complex, multi-layered character you couldn’t help but root for. I really wanted her to come out on top somehow. I loved that she was so smart and was really the one who launched Boysie’s career, not him. It was also interesting to see how she responded to the position Boysie put her in of having to care for the son he so cherished. It said so much about her character’s trustworthiness and fundamental morality, in spite of the things she’d had to do to survive, and because of the way she cared for the son, she was a wonderfully unique merging of Madonna and Whore (and Entrepreneurial Bad-Ass Girl Boss, of course).
What about you? Who was your favourite?
BM: Okay… this might seem strange given that I was just talking about how much I enjoyed the four female perspectives, but Boysie was my favourite. It’s hard to explain, but there are some characters who just grab you by the heart – or the throat – and don’t let you go and that didn’t quite happen for me with any of the women. And while I know that this is historical fiction and so the author would be somewhat constricted by reality, certain characters like Rosie – the promiscuous bisexual – felt a little too familiar in my opinion.
But Boysie himself was so unexpected. We’re used to the gang boss as a tough guy with a sex drive that won’t quit. But Boysie was a badass in the streets and a baby in the sheets. Literally—the way he gets comfort is by mimicking breastfeeding with his partners. As Doris says: “Big man Boysie, Mr Badjohn, Rajah, Gambling King, Land Shark, snuggled up like a newborn and suckled on my milk-less breasts. In less than ten minutes he was in a deep sleep, still latched on to me. Ever so gently I got him on to the pillow. He never stopped snoring. Boysie loves to play baby.”
Eww. But also, I was transfixed by his whole dynamic with Doris. Mini-spoiler alert: they get married, but they never have sex. Ingrid absolutely explodes the myth of the badjohn with the hot rod and heart of steel.
CM: Agreed! I thought Boysie and Doris’s dynamic was really unexpected and original. The breastfeeding and Boysie’s need for infantile comforting was… unusual—to put it euphemistically.
Ick factor aside, Doris’s sexless marriage and all the breastfeeding were also interesting for the way they blurred the dichotomous line between Madonna and Whore. Like Popo, the dichotomy doesn’t fully apply. Would you agree?
BM: 100%! Ingrid smashes some of the stereotypes that limit people to binary identities based on gendered expectations. Like, Mana Lala is the narrator who most closely resembles the Madonna; she’s the only biological mother and her dream is to be Boysie’s wife. But there’s trickery and darkness swirling behind that good-girl facade and she’s the instigator of some of the most harrowing events in the book.
I can’t say any more on that without dropping major spoilers. So, I want to transition to one of my favourite topics: the supernatural. What did you think of the folklore in the novel?
CM: The allegedly vengeful magic sword and Boysie’s belief in the obeah woman’s powers were rooted in fact, so I enjoyed having those elements worked into the story and thought it showed a lot about Boysie’s character. You’d expect someone so cold-blooded and mercenary to be an extreme cynic, but it says a lot about his background, and maybe about his intellect, that he believed so wholly in these things. Anyway, for me, those folkloric elements worked well because they were fact-based and sprinkled in, but the ramping up of that magical realist feel towards the end with Rosie’s character was a bit of an unexpected turn for me.
BM: We know the ending; Trinis probably went in knowing and, for readers going in blind, the novel opens with Boysie’s hanging. So I’d say an unexpected turn on the final pages is a good thing. I devoured Ingrid’s previous novel, Love After Love. But it was totally different; so this book was a bit of an unexpected turn for me. I love that writerly unpredictability and I can’t wait to read whatever she does next!
CM: Me too, absolutely. There’ll always be a space on my nightstand for anything Ingrid writes.
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Caroline Mackenzie is a Trinidadian writer, translator and Open scholarship winner, whose fiction has appeared in publications around the world. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and she won first prize for fiction in the 2018 Small Axe Literary Competition. Her debut novel One Year of Ugly was published in 2020, and her work was recently featured in the anthology Unstitching Silence in 2025.
Breanne Mc Ivor was also born and raised in Trinidad. She studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Fish One-Page Prize and the Derek Walcott Writing Prize. In 2015, she won The Caribbean Writer’s David Hough Literary Prize. Where There Are Monsters, her first short story collection, was published by in 2019, followed by The God of Good Looks in 2013.