My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica
Edith Clarke’s groundbreaking anthropological study on Jamaican family patterns has been highly influential in Caribbean Studies for decades.
Going Home to Teach
“Winkler’s account of the year spent in Jamaica teaching at a rural teacher training college is a rich combination of autobiography and incisive social commentary, with a wealth of material including contrasts between the American and Jamaican outlooks, insights into the dilemma of being a member of a privileged minority, and lessons about the perils […]
The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey Or, Africa for Africans
A Jamaican living in the US, Marcus Garvey advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global movement, known as Garveyism. This book, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1923) was compiled by his wife, Amy Euphemia Jacques Garvey, mainly from his speeches.
Reel from “The Life-Movie”
McNeill’s second poetry collection Reel from ‘The Life Movie’ (1972) established his reputation as one of the most promising Jamaican poets of his generation.
Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal
In Dying to Better Themselves, Olive Senior examines the neglected post-emancipation generation of the 1850s who were lured to Panama by the promise of lucrative work and who initiated a pattern of circular migration that would transform the islands economically, socially and politically well into the twentieth century.
Small Island
Small Island by bestselling author Andrea Levy won the Orange Prize for Fiction, as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Whitbread. It has been called the definitive fictional account of the experiences of the Empire Windrush generation (Headline Publisher Group).
Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood
Rachel Manley, granddaughter and daughter of two of Jamaica’s national leaders, tells the story of the brilliant and artistic Manleys, Jamaica’s most prominent and glamorous political family, and the house in which they lived, Drumblair.
A Long Way from Home
A Jamaican-born author of poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction, McKay has often been associated with the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American art, culture, and intellectualism between World War I and the Great Depression. But his relationship to the movement was complex. In his 1937 autobiography, A Long Way from Home, McKay explains […]
Brown Girl in the Ring
Brown Girl in the Ring is a post-apocalyptic novel written by Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. The novel contains Afro-Caribbean culture with themes of folklore and magical realism.
Augustown
One April day in Augustown, Jamaica. Ma Taffy, old and blind, sits in her usual spot on the veranda. No matter how the world tilts around her, come hurricane or riot, she knows everything that goes on in this small community. Which is why, when her six-year-old nephew returns home from school with his dreadlocks […]
The Long Song
Told in the irresistibly willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, The Long Song is at once defiant, funny, and shocking. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides […]
The Pain Tree
The stories in this OCM Bocas Prize winning collection range over almost a hundred years, from around the time of the second world war to the present. Jamaica is the setting but the range of characters presented are universally recognisable as people in crisis or on the cusp of transformation.
Banana Bottom
Bita Plant is adopted and sent to England from Jamaica by white missionary benefactors and returns to her home village of Banana Bottom seven years later a beautiful, cultured young lady.
Brother Man
Originally published in 1954 and acclaimed around the world as one of the classics of Caribbean fiction, Brother Man is the tragic story of an honest Rastafarian healer caught up in a web of intrigue and betrayal in Jamaica’s tough West Kingston slums.
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: a novel in bass riddim
Midnight Robber
I Am Becoming My Mother
In Lorna Goodison’s poetry collection, she focuses on the “The Mother”, the female element, evoked in her title.
Myal
Gardening in the Tropics
Escape to Last Man Peak
Summer Lightning and Other Stories
These short stories, told through the eyes of children, remind us that child-like vision expose some of the harsh truths to which systems and society have become blind.
The Book of Night Women
James’ powerful second novel follows Lilith, a slave girl whose coming into her own strengths mirrors the complexity of the slavery plantation and feminine power.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Fiction, this expansive work is James’ third novel which explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, “the singer”, in Jamaica and the country’s aftermath in the 1970s and early 80s, a definitive and violent period in its history.
Culture and Customs of Jamaica
Free
Blue Mountain Trouble
Pandemic Poems
Pandemic Poems: First Wave (self-published), the latest book by esteemed Jamaican writer Olive Senior, collects a sequence of new poems composed in 2020, and originally posted on social media. “Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic — an A to Z of the lexicon […]
Mother Muse
Mother Muse (Carcanet), a new collection of poems by Jamaican Lorna Goodison, who recently completed her term as Poet Laureate of Jamaica.
One Thousand Eyes
One Thousand Eyes (UWI Press), the latest novel by Jamaica-born, Trinidad-based Barbara Lalla, speculative fiction set in the Caribbean after a catastrophic event.
Things I Have Withheld
Things I Have Withheld (Canongate), a new collection of essays by Jamaica-born Kei Miller, winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.