Phoebe McIntosh [Stuart Simpson, Penguin Random House]

PHOEBE McIntosh’s enthralling debut novel Dominoes is a romantic love story that also explores the legacy of the slave trade and racism today.

Layla is a mixed-race woman who falls for Andy, a white man. When they first meet, they can’t believe they have the same surname. But after they become engaged, Sera, Layla’s best friend, starts to express her concerns about Layla settling down with Andy.

A few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a disturbing discovery about their shared name, and her research uncovers parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined.

She faces an impossible choice, between past and future, her friendship and her marriage. It takes her on an unplanned journey to Jamaica with her mum and grandad in an attempt to understand who she is and where she comes from.

An actor and playwright from north London, Phoebe wrote and performed her first play, The Tea Diaries, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. This was followed by Dominoes, devised as a one-woman play, in 2018.

Needing work and tired of waiting for suitable parts, Phoebe wrote the solo show in order to give herself something to perform.

“At drama school, they encouraged us to make our own work rather than waiting for auditions or for other people’s projects,” she says.

“It took many years for that to sink in, but when it finally did I understood that it would be the most fulfilling acting work I could do; my own plays. I wanted the challenge of performing a solo show but needed the right story.”

Her inspiration for Dominoes was the BBC documentary, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.

It identified some research by University College London (UCL) which recorded how former slave owners were entitled to compensation for their loss of “property” after abolition. UCL had a database cataloguing the families that received payouts after abolition. You could type in a name and see the amount of compensation that the former slave owners and their descendants had received.

Phoebe already had several fragments of stories and monologues she’d written about her mixed-race background, autobiographical anecdotes and ideas “on everything from weddings to race” and these two strands became the glue that held the narrative together.

She also learned that her in-laws had the same surname, which she found intriguing.

Layla’s grandfather loves playing dominoes, a game, Phoebe says, played in lots of Jamaican households. “It was a pastime for us whenever we’d visit my grandad. It felt more than a game.

“Sometimes it was a vehicle for deep discussions and other times we’d play in silence with reggae on the record player in the background. But the title speaks to the situation Layla finds herself in too – black and white, white spots on black dominoes, black spots on white dominoes – it was a no-brainer for the title.”

Phoebe had several responses to the original theatre show: “People wanted to learn more about Andy and Sera especially, their views their backstories etc. I was keen to adapt the play for the screen and had already written the first few pages of a feature script.

“Meanwhile, I was working on a different idea for a novel on the Tamasha x Hachette creative writing programme on but it didn’t seem to be flowing. Someone suggested that Dominoes should be expanded into a book. I took that advice and ran with it. It’s more detailed and intimate, includes new backdrops like Jamaica and gives more time and space to Layla’s relationships.”

Layla is a beautifully nuanced and memorable heroine.

Phoebe says: “Being on the cusp of 30 and the cusp of marriage are milestones that have the potential to feel seismic for anyone, and particularly women. Throw in a sense of not fully knowing or owning who you are, because you feel like you’re caught between two cultures, and you’ve got an identity crisis on your hands. Layla is flawed and at times erratic but hopefully she is someone readers learn to understand, grow to care about, and root for her to figure it all out.”

There is a wonderful section in the book set in Jamaica. Phoebe is Jamaican and English.

“My grandad was born in St Ann, while my grandma comes from Kingston. They may have left the island to come to the UK during the Windrush era but the island never left them. It’s in our blood.”

But Phoebe actually wrote the majority of the Jamaica scenes on a day trip to Birmingham.

“It was during Covid, so Birmingham was as close I was going to get. Being there, moving through the city, soaking up the noise, the interactions between people, the market ambience, it helped me transport my mind to Kingston, even if my body had to stay behind in the Midlands!”

Phoebe deftly weaves the political into her love story and Dominoes is a thrilling read.

She hopes the novel “will inspire interactions between people from different walks of life to come from a place of kindness. That would feel like a special thing.”

• Dominoes. By Phoebe McIntosh, Chatto & Windus, £16.99