If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the debut book of fiction by Jamaican-American Jonathan Escoffery, offers a sequence of linked short stories about a Jamaican family who migrate to Miami in the 1970s, and the consequences over subsequent decades of this uprooting on the protagonist Trelawny. Born in the US, surrounded by but also in some ways excluded from the Jamaican culture of his parents, Trelawny’s story is one of survival through striving to make a home for himself in an often hostile society, with a vivacious attitude to luck and circumstance.