Archives: Books

Children of the Eternal Mother

Children of the Eternal Mother (self-published), the debut novel by Trinidadian playwright and arts worker Keon Francis, draws on the deep folkloric traditions of T&T to create an epic narrative saga. A powerful prophecy looms over Siwo and Roucou, both of whom have their own destinies to follow. Will they choose to take up the […]

Forecast Form

Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today (DelMonico Books), a multigenerational, cross-border compilation edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates to accompany an exhibition of the same name, positions the Caribbean’s art history and future as a site of perpetual renewal. Studying the work of thirty-seven artists, including T&T’s Christopher Cozier, Jamaica’s Ebony G. Patterson, and the […]

Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts (Bloomsbury, UK; Ecco, US), the new novel by 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Kevin Jared Hosein, plots the misfortunes and secret pleasures of two vastly different families in 1940s Trinidad. Tackling the concept of T&T as a “frontier” in that era, the novel signals a marked evolution in Hosein’s published fiction to […]

I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be

I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Jonathan Cape), subtitled “A Memoir in Eight Lives”, reflects Colin Grant’s family journey through respectability and race politics, shaping a domestic sphere that is at once intensely personal and universal. Born in Britain to Jamaican parents, Grant approaches the story of his family with rare transparency, showing […]

Not Quite Without a Moon

Not Quite Without a Moon (Peepal Tree Press) gathers Ian McDonald’s poems written over the past four years. Though the novel The Hummingbird Tree is the Trinidad-born writer’s best-known work, his career as a poet is both prolific and resonant. This new collection meditates on family ties and the tenacious consolations of nature even amid […]

On the Day I Was Born

Book cover of the Bocas Lit Fest “On the Day I Was Born, WE Lit Student Chapbook 2022,” featuring an illustration of a person floating inside a bubble against a dark night sky.

On 14 January, the Bocas Lit Fest launched On the Day I Was Born, a limited-edition chapbook containing short stories and poems by student participants in a series of online masterclasses, part of the We Lit project funded by the JB Fernandes Memorial Trust. We Lit is a comprehensive programme that introduces students to books […]

Patchwork

Patchwork: Essays & Interviews on Caribbean Visual Culture (Intellect Ltd.), by 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction winner Jacqueline Bishop, assembles a critical repository of responses to the transformative art being made in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Drawing on the contributions of artists such as Wendy Nanan and Olivia McGilchrist, Patchwork uses an extended […]

River Sing Me Home

River Sing Me Home (Penguin Random House), a novel by the granddaughter of Windrush immigrants Eleanor Shearer, charts a cross-Caribbean historical journey of enslavement, freedom, and redemption. From Barbados to British Guiana to Trinidad, runaway ex-enslaved Rachel searches for her children, willing to risk everything to discover their fates. Set in slavery’s immediate aftermath, River […]

Cane, Corn & Gully

Cane, Corn & Gully (Out-Spoken Press), the debut book by Barbadian-British Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, brings together poems and dance “to observe, question, and ruminate on what it means to adopt, perform, and pass down the notion of black West Indian femininity.” Diagrammed notations of traditional Caribbean dance movements as well as “everyday rituals” alternate with […]

Home Is Not a Place

Home Is Not a Place (William Collins), by British photographer Johnny Pitts and Trinidadian-British poet Roger Robinson, explores Black British history and culture through images, poems, and essays documenting a roadtrip across the length and breadth of Britain, made by the authors during 2021. “The authors found not only Black British culture long overlooked in […]

Hurvin Anderson

Hurvin Anderson (Rizzoli), the first major monograph on the work of the Jamaican-British artist, nominated for the Turner Prize, includes substantial visual documentation of his career, with a foreword by Courtney J. Martin, an essay by Catherine Lampert, and poems by Roger Robinson. In Anderson’s paintings, the publisher writes, “a tug-of-war plays out between abstraction […]

Still Standing

Still Standing: The Ti Kais of Dominica (Papillote Press), with text by Adom Philogene-Heron and photographs by Marica Honychurch, is an amply illustrated volume telling the story of the vernacular architecture of Dominica, and in particular the traditional wooden cottages called ti kais. Designed to be economical to construct but also resilient against hurricanes and […]

The Islands

The Islands (Catapult), a new book of short fiction by Jamaican-descended Canadian Dionne Irving, ranges over continents and decades to tell the restless stories of Jamaican women at home and in the far-flung diaspora. These characters — immigrants from Jamaica or the offspring of immigrants — grapple with practicalities of displacement, self-reinvention, and the finding […]

Alexander Bedward, the Prophet of August Town

Alexander Bedward, the Prophet of August Town: Race, Religion and Colonialism (University of the West Indies Press), by historian Dave St. Aubyn Gosse, is a study of a historical figure once considered a joke, now being recognised as an important Black nationalist thinker. The Jamaican Revivalist preacher Alexander Bedward, born in 1848, won an islandwide […]

Black Man Listen

Black Man Listen: The Life of JR Ralph Casimir (Papillote Press), by Kathy Casimir MacLean, is a biography of Dominica’s leading Pan-African activist, written by his granddaughter. Born in 1898 and enjoying a lifespan of nearly a century, Casimir was a poet, journalist, editor, and teacher, as well as the general secretary of Dominica’s branch […]

Narcissus

Narcissus (Broken Sleep Books), the fourth full collection of poems by Trinidadian Andre Bagoo, draws on Ancient Greek myth — specifically, the story of the beautiful doomed youth who becomes obsessed with his own image — to explore queerness and violence, and the entanglements between body and spirit, the human and the non-human. As concerned […]

Tropic Death

Tropic Death (Simi Press), the acclaimed collection of short stories by Guyanese Eric Walrond, has been reissued nearly a century after its original publication in 1926. Born in Georgetown in 1898, Walrond migrated to New York City at the age of 19, and quickly entered the literary and intellectual circles of the Harlem Renaissance. Set […]

If I Survive You

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 […]

Radical Normalisation

Radical Normalisation (Carcanet Press), the first full-length book of poems by Dominican writer Celia Sorhaindo, ranges in its concerns from family life to mental health, from the aftereffects of natural disaster — specifically, Hurricane Maria, which devastated Dominica in 2017 — to the place of a writer in a literary tradition, and what poetry can […]

Claude McKay

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia University Press), a new study by historian Winston James, focuses on the political life of the renowned Jamaican writer and activist — “a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition.” James describes how McKay’s Jamaican upbringing, followed by his early […]