Collected Poems, 1937-1989
Collected Poems by A.J. Seymour from 1937-1989 is a collection of published and unpublished works by the late A.J. Seymour, edited by Ian McDonald and J. de Weever.
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 […]
How to Escape from a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories
The debut collection of stories by Tiphanie Yanique, set mostly in the US Virgin Islands. Part oral history, part postcolonial narrative, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is ultimately a loving portrait of a wholly unique place.
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.
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.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Antes que Anochezca (Before Night Falls)
The autobiography of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, describing his early life in Cuba, his time in prison, and his escape to the United States in 1980. Born to a poverty-stricken family in rural Cuba, by the time of his death in New York four decades later, he had become one of Cuba’s most important poets, an […]
Christopher
Set in Barbados, the novel follows a young boy named Christopher, home for the school holidays at his family’s stately plantation house. “Its depiction of a lost world of white colonial life, as well as its sensitive portrayal of the pains and pleasures of growing up, give it an enduring value. If, on the one […]
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl is a play by Trinidadian actor, playwright and director Errol John. It centres on a group of characters living close to the poverty line in a shared tenement yard in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
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.
Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth)
The work that established Fanon as a leading intellectual in the international decolonization movement.
Measures of Expatriation
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (2016). In Measures of Expatriation Vahni Capildeo’s poems and prose-poems speak of the complex alienation of the expatriate, and address wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society
Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting
In Shivanee Ramlochan’s first collection of poems, Trinidad and Caribbean poetry finds an exciting new voice, one that displays a sharp intelligence, and iconoclastic spirit and fertility of imagination.
A Portable Paradise
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, these are finely crafted poems reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and engage our thoughts, as in the sequence of […]
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.
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.
The Star-Apple Kingdom
Most of the poems in this collection follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with “The Schooner Flight,” in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad, sailing northward to meet his fate, and ending with “The Star-Apple Kingdom,” a long poem […]
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).
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 […]
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
A beautifully written, unforgettable novel of a troubled marriage, set against the lush landscape and political turmoil of post-colonial Trinidad.
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.
Crossing the River
Crossing the River is a historical novel that explores the abandonment and misery of slavery.
Redemption in Indigo
Karen Lord’s debut novel, which won the prestigious Frank Collymore Literary Prize in Barbados, is an intricately woven tale of adventure, magic, and the power of the human spirit.
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.
The Ventriloquist’s Tale
In Melville’s ambitious and richly realized debut set in modern-day Guyana, religious, social and philosophical tensions beset all the characters.
Letters from London
In 1932 CLR James left his home in Trinidad for the first time and sailed to the United Kingdom to fulfil his literary ambitions. During his first weeks in London he wrote a series of vigorously opinionated essays for the Port of Spain Gazette, giving his impressions of the great city and its inhabitants, and describing his […]
At The Bottom of the River
At the Bottom of the River is a collection of short stories by Caribbean novelist Jamaica Kincaid. Published in 1983, it was her first short story collection.
I Is A Long Memoried Woman
First published in 1983 to gain the distinction of being the first book of poetry written by a Caribbean woman to have won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, it has since become a modern classic.