Ibis
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE **
A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in the novel Ibis.
“This brilliant, shape-shifting novel teems with charms and curses, stunning disasters and startling moments of grace.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
“Justin Haynes proves himself an absolute alchemist of fiction . . . This is a stunning debut as witty as is it is rapturous.” ―Jericho Brown, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition
“Evoking the themes of Ovid, the language of Toni Morrison, and the genre-blending of Octavia Butler, Haynes scales the heights of his ambition. This soaring work is not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.
In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
Justin Haynes was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and later moved to Brooklyn, New York. Having earned his MFA from Notre Dame, he continued his graduate studies at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded various fiction residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly, SX Salon Small Axe Project, and PREE. Justin lives in Atlanta and teaches English at Oglethorpe University.