A lively illustrated masterpiece, this is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the 13-year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale. While holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary, and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over their home. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land, and torrential rains lash the roof. Celebrating Jamaica's resilience in the face of natural disasters, this account follows the family as they huddle, worry, wait, and hope--together.
From the 1930s through the dawning of a new century, these tender and moving stories underscore living life with style and hidden steel despite one's circumstances and warn against disregarding the past struggles of others. Doux Thibaut negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz, confronting the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, the haz
The Sleepers of Roraima first published in Great Britain in 1970; The Age of the Rainmakers first published in 1971.
Set in Jamaica, this novel discusses the island's story of slavery and independence from a personal perspective, shifting from an 18th-century narrative to one in the 1980s. Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at the age of 15 following her parents' divorce. In the wake of her mother's death another 15 years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors: Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th-century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who came to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ended up questioning the foundations of his beliefs. Leigh struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history as she also encounters the familiarity of home and the strangeness of being white in a black country. Examining themes of homecoming, belonging, love, and redemption, this novel--loosely based on the author's own family history--explores how individuals navigate the inequalities and privileges they are born into and how the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation occur in everyday contemporary life.
In these truthful, strange, funny, and tragic short stories set in Barbados and the United States, a path is woven through the joys and suffering of women's lives--from breast cancer, madness, and abortion to love, magic, and a deep connectedness between women--leading always to remarkable, unexpected places. These believable characters' voices rage, weep, and laugh through stories that are sometimes in the form of letters, conversations, whispered secrets, or raw cries for help. Themes of race, gender, and sexual orientation are key to these stories, as is the interplay between modernity and the African traditions of the Caribbean. Also explored are the connections between spirituality and the supernatural and between sanity and madness.
Set in multiracial London, this new novel from Peepal Tree's most popular writer is a comedy about identity, community, growing old (and people and dogs). Beneath the laughter lurks a bittersweet sense of human fragility and impermanence.
The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, of the power of poetry and creativity
Strange, fantastic, poetic and captivating, Anthony Joseph's time-bending novel tells the story of Raphael, butcher and would-be author. Many of his characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But miraculously, the novel that he's been writing for forty-one years, in 100 chapters of 1000 words seems to suddenly write itself...
Seni Seneviratne delves into her father's experience of WW2, the only non-white signalman in a platoon stationed in North Africa. Sparked by a collection of photos, the poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed "Snowball" in his lens.
The stranger than fiction true story of Boysie Singh - Robber, Arsonist, Pirate, Mass-Murderer, Vice and Gambling King of Trinidad.
This book, based on a conference organized by Friends of Mr Biswas, explores the writing careers of Seepersad Naipaul and his two sons, Vidia and Shiva, within the supportive but sometimes painful closeness of family connections--synergies that V.S. Naipaul sometimes laboured to conceal, as the publishing history of his father's collection of short stories and Letters between a Father and Son both show. Essays by Brinsley Samaroo and Aaron Eastley focus on Seepersad Naipaul's importance as a journalist who revealed hidden areas in Trinidadian society, who boldly creolised reporting styles and showed his sons the possibilities of combining fiction and non-fiction. Arnold Rampersad, in his moving essay on his journalist father, Jerome, further makes the case for a tradition of Trinidadian newspaper writing that achieves literary quality. Some of the essays find new things to say about V.S. Naipaul: Andre Bagoo writes on his fascination with gay sexuality and cinema; another essay deals with the themes of sadomasochism and incest. Robert Clarke provides a visual dimension to the book in a photo essay on the St James district of Port of Spain, which contains 26 Nepaul Street, the house for Mr Biswas, and J. Vijay Maharaj writes on the complementary art of Shastri Maharaj.
In using an epigraph from the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, for years incarcerated in the madhouse, Nicholas Laughlin stakes his case for a poetics that is located between a radical innocence of risk and a knowing familiarity with the histories of poetic forms. On the one hand, knowing that "The less you know, the less mistaken", Laughlin's poetry has room for the accidental, the punning slip and the puzzlingly axiomatic ("You bruise a grammar before it bruises you.") Like the brilliant Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill with his "mutants" (retained typos), for Laughlin "Errors are not accidents". On the other hand, Enemy Luck is almost an encyclopaedia of ingenious devices and forms: cut-outs that hint at kidnapping threats; a poem that resembles the often mystifying chapter summaries of the 19th-century novel (in which...); visits to geographical territories mutated from a Wilson Harris novel; found fragments; lengthier extracts from a variety of sources, from Strabo to Oliver Goldsmith, whose meaning is changed by their new contexts; translations where the original is absorbed into a characteristic Laughlin voice; an index to some fugitive travel narrative that invites the reader to construct their own story; seemingly absurd narratives that make perfectly good sense; seemingly realistic narratives that mystify like an Escher building; a cast of personas from Cousin Hermes to King Q. Here is a collection that invites us to active reading, to picking up clues, to inserting ourselves into the dialogue between the poems. Above all, Nicholas Laughlin challenges us to think about the expectations and accumulated experiences we bring to the shaping influence of a variety of literary forms - and helps us to deconstruct them.
Gordon RohlehrâEUR(TM)s critical work is outstanding in the balance it achieves between its particularity and its breadth âEUR" from the detailed unpacking of a poemâEUR(TM)s inner workings, to locating Caribbean writing in the sweep of political and cultural history âEUR" and the equal respect he pays to literary and to popular cultural forms. His âEURArticulating a Caribbean AestheticâEUR? remains a stunningly pertinent and concise account of the historical formation of the cultural shifts that framed Caribbean writing as a distinctive body of work. Indeed, along with Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter and Kenneth Ramchand, no critic has done more to establish the subject of Caribbean writing and its distinctive aesthetics. These essays, written between 1969 to 1986, first published in radical campaigning newspapers such as Tapia and Moko, and first collected in 1992, were the work of a young academic who was both changing the university curriculum, and deeply engaged with the less privileged world outside the campus. Rohlehr catches Caribbean writing at the point when it leaves behind its nationalist hopes and begins to challenge the complex realities of independence. Few critics have written as clearly about how deeply the colonial has remained embedded in the postcolonial. What shines in RohlehrâEUR(TM)s work is not merely its depth, acuity and humanity, but its courage. He writes when his subject is still emergent, without waiting for the credibility of metropolitan endorsements as a guide to the canon. âEURMy Strangled CityâEUR?, a record of how TrinidadâEUR(TM)s poets responded to the upsurge of revolutionary hopes, radical shams, repressions and disappointed dreams of 1964-1975 is an indispensable account of those times and the diversity of literary response that continues to speak to the present. And if in these essays Trinidad is RohlehrâEUR(TM)s primary focus, his perspective is genuinely regional. His native Guyana is always present in his thoughts and several essays show his deep interest in the cultural productions of a âEURdreadâEUR? Jamaica, and in making insightful comparisons between, for instance, reggae and calypso.
Breanne Mc Ivor is a bold new voice in Caribbean fiction. The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they look both within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber - or even cannibalism lurking far off the beaten track - have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore. In Mc Ivor's stories they become real and terrifying daylight presences, monsters who pass among us. Her great gift as a writer is to take us to unexpected places, both to seduce us into a kind of sympathy for her monsters of greater and lesser kinds, and sometimes to reveal a capacity for redemption amongst characters we are tempted to dismiss as shallow, unlikable human beings. The problem, in a world of masks and disguises, is how to tell the difference. In these carefully crafted stories, with room for humor, though of a distinctly gothic kind, Breanne Mc Ivor reaches deep into the roots of Trinidad folk narratives to present us with very modern versions of our troubled selves.
Contemporary poetry from Black British and British Asian writers.
An anthology of the very best contemporary Caribbean short stories, edited by Jeremy Poynting and Jacob Ross.
Set in a colonial Caribbean country in the post-war years, Stranger at the Gate is a classic Caribbean novel with the narrative drive of Hemingway, the sense of fate of classical Greek tragedy, a sensuous appreciation of Jamaica, and an acute, if indulgent, portrayal of the white and light-brown landed and commercial elite.
In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice.
A novel written in the form of a screenplay, Cut Guavas is a rigorous fictional exploration of fanfiction, politics and Planet of the Apes.
"When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016, it was seen as doing something quite new: two poets recognised as being at the top of their game in, respectively, Australian and Caribbean poetry, had risked, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily "structure of call-and-response, each utterance...filtered through the other." Karen McCar
Indira Gabriel, recently abandoned by her lover, embarks on a project to reinvigorate a dilapidated bar into something special. Like a Trinidadian Cheers, a rich cast of characters come together in this warm, funny, sexy, and bittersweet first novel.
Combining life-writing with poetic prose, Anthony Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener.
With a mature and accomplished voice, this novel explores the growth in presence of radical Islam within the Caribbean. Under the shadow of corporate imperialism, complete with disenfranchised islanders, corrupt government ministers, and scheming U.S.-oil companies, Beatrice Salandy finds love with Adbul, a man who is second in command in a rising radical Muslim movement. With welfare schemes, grass-roots campaigning, and an air of incorruptibility, the movement becomes wildly popular with the island's poorest classes. But as events unfold, Beatrice begins to question Adbul's sincerity and honesty, and he becomes a fascinatingly unreliable voice in this moving and timely novel.
A unique combination of passion and compassion, sensitivity and sensuality, this collection of poetry infuses themes from the author's South Asian heritage with the Shetland Islands--a marginalized slice of Britain. With a dramatic and distinctively personal voice, these poems touch on a wide range of subjects, from a love for language and the anguish of war to Queen Victoria and the history of the waltz.
Each piece in this dynamic poetic biography uses the voices of iconic figures past and present in a bold exploration of such hot topics as gender, race, and spirituality. The mode of presentation continually shifts--from dramatic monologue or prose poem, to prophetic rant--to provide fresh, moving viewpoints on subjects as various as the senility of a beloved grandmother and Michael Jackson's racial transformations.
What brings Charlo Pardie--an almost elderly peasant farmer--to leave his wife after a life together? Will he return? Set on a small Caribbean island, this mystery creates a vivid portrait of a rural community subject to the hostilities of nature and the tempests of their own relationships. Drawing heavily on the Anglo/French Creole cultures of the Caribbean, this work captures place and creates a fascinating group of characters struggling with the choices of adult life.
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