Selected Poems
Selected Poems (Penguin) by Linton Kwesi Johnson is a new, expanded edition of an essential text, offering a four-decade survey of the groundbreaking work of the Jamaica-born, Britain-based poet. Early classics like the timeless “Inglan Is a Bitch” rub shoulders with new work from the past decade, while an introduction by journalist Gary Younge explains […]
Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails
Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the award-winning debut novel by Guadeloupean-French Estelle-Sarah Brulle (translated by Julia Grawemeyer) moves between the rural countryside of Guadeloupe, the colonial city of Pointe-à-Pitre, and metropolitan France, unravelling an epic family story centred on the character of Aunt Antoine. The legacies of colonialism, forbidden love […]
Writers of Dominica, 1920–2020
Writers of Dominica, 1920–2020 (Emmanuel Publishing House), compiled by Alick Lazare, offers a broad, rich overview of the literature of Dominica over the past century, combining a critical study of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea with selections from 44 other writers of prose and poetry hailing from the Nature Isle — following “the growth […]
Greenland
Greenland (Amistad), the debut novel by Bahamian-American David Santos Donaldson, features a young Black queer author, Kip, researching and writing the story of Mohammed el Adl, the Egyptian lover of the famed British author E.M. Forster. The novel “seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist’s journey […]
John Humphrey
John Humphrey: The Ideology of Partnership (Royards) by Zorina Shah, a biography of the iconic Trinidadian politician, government minister, architect, and masman, helps fill a gap in T&T’s recent social history. Often considered a maverick or political radical, Humphrey may be best remembered for his efforts to make land — for housing and agriculture — […]
Now Lila Knows
Now Lila Knows (Akashic Books), the latest novel by Trinidadian-American Elizabeth Nunez, tells the gripping and timely story of a Caribbean professor on her way to an academic post in a small Vermont town, where she witnesses the killing of a Black man by police. Nunez’s narrative brings together urgent questions about race and violence […]
Sonnets for Albert
Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury), the new poetry collection by Trinidad-born Anthony Joseph, is a deeply personal, deeply emotional exploration of family, masculinity, and “the impact of being the son of an absent, or mostly absent, father.” Using a form Joseph calls the calypso sonnet — an Afro-Caribbean twist on the classic fourteen-line model — the […]
The Animated Forest
The Animated Forest (Peepal Tree Press) is the long-awaited debut poetry collection by Trinidad-born, US-based Samantha Thornhill, already the author of a series of children’s books. The poems speak to Thornhill’s “core belief in the power of empathy and compassion as aesthetic markers.” The book reveals “the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant’s imagination […]
The Che Guevara Reader
The Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution (Seven Stories Press), edited by David Deutschmann and Maria del Carmen Ari Garcia, brings together essays, speeches, and personal letters by the Argentina-born hero of the Cuban Revolution, to “highlight his principled politics and praxis in the fight against capitalism and US imperialism.” A timeline of […]
The Tribe
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba (Graywolf Press), a collection of non-fiction pieces by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne, explores the last decade of Cuban history, through portraits of artists, musicians, and writers, as well as black market dealers, nurses, policeman, and a wide range of real-life characters. The form of the crónica — […]
Zo and the Forest of Secrets
Zo and the Forest of Secrets (Knights of), the debut book of children’s fiction by Trinidadian Alake Pilgrim, follows a young girl on a thrilling supernatural journey through the forests of her home island. This first novel in a new fantasy series brings together elements of mystery and mysticism, grounded in the very real landscape […]
Adrian Cola Rienzi
Adrian Cola Rienzi: The Life and Times of an Indo-Caribbean Progressive (Royards) by eminent historian Brinsley Samaroo offers a thoroughly researched account of a key figure in Trinidad and Tobago’s political development. Born in 1905, Krishna Deonarine — who renamed himself when he left Trinidad to study law in Ireland — was at different stages […]
Buyers Beware
Buyers Beware: Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture (Rutgers University Press) by US-based Trinidadian scholar Patricia Joan Saunders examines phenomena such as dancehall culture and “sistah lit” which “proudly jettison any aspirations towards middle-class respectability.” The book asks “how their ‘pulp’ preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for […]
I Used to Live Here Once
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (William Collins), a new biography by Miranda Seymour, is a vivid portrait of the brilliant, troubled, Dominican writer. Drawing on surviving letters and other documents, and on Rhys’s often autobiographical fiction to fill the many gaps, Seymour portrays Rhys’s talent, ambition, and tenacity […]
Wild Fires
Wild Fires (Borough Press), the debut novel by Trinidad-born Sophie Jai, explores memory, secrets, and grief through a family story that ranges between Trinidad and Toronto. Summoned back to her immigrant family’s home after the death of a cousin, Cassandra is plunged into a web of tensions and silences “where sooner or later every secret, […]
History Matters
History Matters: Selected Newspaper Columns, 2011–2021 (Paria Publishing) by Bridget Brereton is an ample assembly of insightful, accessible short essays by the eminent historian, who is professor emerita at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Originally published in the Trinidad and Tobago Express, these columns range across the breadth of T&T and Caribbean […]
Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution
Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Duke University Press), a little-known text by C.L.R. James, returns to print more than six decades after it was first written. This history of the Ghanaian Independence movement “offers a revised understanding of Africa’s shaping of freedom movements and insight into the possibilities for decolonial futures.”
The Most Magnificent!
The Most Magnificent! (Everything Slight Pepper), a new book for young readers by authors Jeunanne Alkins and Neala Bhagwansingh, illustrated by Sayada Ramdial, offers a fun, colourful lesson about history and heritage. The ornate historic buildings along the western edge of Port of Spain’s Queen’s Park Savannah, popularly known as the Magnificent Seven come to […]
C.L.R. James
C.L.R. James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable) by British author John L. Williams is the full-scale, scrupulously researched, admiring but clear-eyed biography of the T&T intellectual icon that Caribbean readers have awaited for decades. James’s long, complicated, continent-crossing life is documented here in gripping detail, from his literary and political interests and achievements to […]
Cane / Fire
Cane / Fire (Book*hug Press) is a new collection of poems by Shani Mootoo, the Canada-based Trinidadian writer and artist best known for her fiction. Accompanied by the author’s own artworks, this sequence of poems is described as akin to a memoir, ranging from Ireland to South Trinidad to Canada, vividly delving into personal and […]
Let the Dead In
Let the Dead In (Alan Squire Publishing), the first full-length poetry collection by Guyana-born Saida Agostini, journeys from Guyana to Britain to the United States in its exploration of “the mythologies that seek to subjugate Black bodies, and the counter-stories that reject such subjugation.” By turns sensual and sorrowful, joyful and righteously enraged, these poems […]
Pòtoprens
Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (Pioneer Works Press), edited by Leah Gordon, co-founder of the Ghetto Biennale, is a massive survey of the “majority art” of Haiti’s capital, exploring how contemporary urban culture is linked to the country’s revolutionary history. Images, critical essays, and oral histories are organised by specific neighbourhoods, suggesting how geography […]
Shabine and Other Stories
Shabine and Other Stories (UWI Press), the debut fiction collection by St. Lucian Hazel Simmons-McDonald, puts family matters at the heart of these short stories, with a touch of magical realism. From the mysteries of childhood to questions of religion and class, these stories feature “characters who closely guard the secrets of their hearts,” and […]
We Slaves of Suriname
We Slaves of Suriname (Polity) by Anton de Kom is a classic work by the early-20th-century Surinamese Independence activist, finally available in English translation nearly nine decades after its original publication. Banished from the then Dutch colony in 1933, de Kom wrote this historical study as “a fierce indictment of racism and colonialism” and an […]
Black Cake
x/ex/exis
100+ Voices for Miss Lou
100+ Voices for Miss Lou (University of the West Indies Press), edited by Jamaican writer and scholar Opal Palmer Adisa, is a massive new anthology of essays, poems, interviews, and other writings celebrating the late Louise Bennett-Coverley, Jamaica’s beloved poet, who died in 2006. The list of contributors is a virtual who’s who of Jamaican […]
Glory Dead
Glory Dead (Peepal Tree Press), the latest in the publisher’s Caribbean Modern Classics Series, is an account of Trinidad in the late 1930s by the left-wing British author Arthur Calder-Marshall. First published in 1939, the book is unsparing in its exploration of social conditions in colonial Trinidad, while its author has “a novelist’s eye for […]
In Search of Mary Seacole
In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Simon and Schuster UK) by Helen Rappaport is a full-length biography of a Jamaican icon who recent scholarship has revealed as a major figure in Victorian British history, though she was nearly forgotten for decades after her death. Born in Jamaica, Seacole migrated to […]
We Are Not Wearing Helmets
We Are Not Wearing Helmets (TriQuarterly), the fifth book of poems by T&T-born, US-based Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, is described as a collection of “political love poems,” exploring the lives and predicaments of women of colour in the US. “These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honour, and endurance,” writes the […]