Tall Is Her Body
Death of the Soccer God
Death of the Soccer God (MCD) by Dimitry Elias Léger establishes the fictional, tempestuous story of Gilbert Chevalier, a lauded athlete in the prime of his athletic career, whose meteoric rise to fame is unexpectedly — and brutally — cut short. Based on the real life and history of Haitian footballer Joe Gaetjens, who was […]
Greetings from the Barracuda Hotel
Greetings from the Barracuda Hotel (Self-Published) by Ronaldo Katwaroo presents short stories steeped in the horrific and macabre, with the fictitious Barracuda Hotel functioning as an architectural and psychological centrepiece to the characters’ baleful journeys. Katwaroo, shortlisted at 19 years old for the 2022 NGC Bocas Youth Writer Award, brings menace and mystery to the […]
Smallie
Smallie (Viking) by Eden McKenzie-Goddard situates its reader in the catalytic era of 1960s Windrush Britain, moving through decades to the present day. Influenced by real life events, Smallie unapologetically probes the sinister foundations of the Windrush scandal, while simultaneously unwinding an affecting story of love, desire, and female empowerment in a heteropatriarchal system. This […]
Janet Jagan
Shut Up and Read
Steelpan Vibrations
And Then Again Begin
And Then Again Begin (Guernica Editions) by H. Nigel Thomas, volume four of the author’s No Safeguards quartet, centres Millington and Jay’s seemingly idyllic marriage, which is itself no stranger to secrets. As the novel progresses, spectres and traumas from both men’s past lives resurface, including religious guilt and shame. And Then Again Begin reckons […]
The Edge of Space-Time
The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon) by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein connects cosmology — the overarching scientific study of the universe — to popular culture, creating linkages between space, time, Black history, Star Trek, and beyond. Prescod-Weinstein, whose first book The Disordered Cosmos was shortlisted in the nonfiction category of the […]
Duels
Duels (Seagull Books) by Néhémy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, presents Haiti in 1842, gripped by financial crisis, struggling to pay off the monstrous independence debt imposed by France. Ludovic Possible, a notary in the town of Boën, founds a schoolhouse equipped to teach children both literacy and practical skills, but […]
Good Good Loving
Good Good Loving (Virago) by Yvvette Edwards presents the full span of a matriarch’s long-storied life in loving and childrearing, as told from her deathbed. The tumultuous decades of one British-Caribbean family’s complex, multi-branched tree are revealed through the bedbound mental wanderings of Ellen, who migrated in her youth from Montserrat to the United Kingdom. […]
Interposition
Interposition (McClelland & Stewart) by Kaie Kellough takes the form of a long poem, rummaging in — and writing with resistance to — the many bewildering artificialities of digital communications shaping how we speak, think, and interact. Large segments of the book were written during 2021, when the mandatory seclusions of the COVID-19 pandemic compounded […]
Looting Hummingbirds
Looting Hummingbirds: Selected Poems of Daniel Thaly (Papillote Press), edited by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, reintroduces readers to the bilingual work of a poet once heralded as the “prince of Antillean poetry” in France. Thaly, born in 1879 in the then-British colony of Dominica, wrote work immersed in that island’s natural landscapes, its flora […]
Essays on the Chinese Diaspora In The Caribbean
Che Lovelace
Che Lovelace (Skira), the first full-length artist’s monograph on Trinidadian painter Che Lovelace, is the most comprehensive book-based presentation of his visual arts career to date. A decade in the making, the monograph is accompanied by essays on Lovelace’s vision and practice, written by prominent curators Rujeko Hockley, Gavin Delahunty, and Ekow Eshun. Lovelace’s paintings […]
The Eternal Forest
The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora (St. Martin’s Press) by Elena Sheppard traces three generations of the author’s family, documenting their politically motivated escape from Cuba to their settlement in Miami and ultimately New York City. Told with unflinching honesty, Sheppard draws on more than dry data to populate the world of […]
The First Thousand Trees
The First Thousand Trees (ECW Press) by Premee Mohamed is the final novella instalment in the Indo-Caribbean author’s post-apocalyptic series The Annual Migration of Clouds. Deepening the repercussions of climate devastation established in books one and two, The First Thousand Trees follows an unexpected, even unlikely character as its protagonist, tracing his journey in the […]
Deeper than the Ocean
Deeper than the Ocean (Union Square & Co.) by Mirta Ojito exhumes generations of suppressed secrets, following a journalist’s quest to unearth the truth about her great-grandmother. Traversing the Canary Islands, Spain, Key West, and Cuba, the novel covers vast geographical terrain. Told in chapters that alternate between the two women, Deeper than the Ocean […]
Fire Sword and Sea
Fire Sword and Sea (William Morrow) by Vanessa Riley draws on the purported real-life legacy of seventeenth-century pirate Jacquotte Delahaye. American-Trinidadian Riley focuses on Delahaye’s extraordinary life and times, highlighting her gender-concealing efforts as pivotal to her swashbuckling fame. A cast of formidable women pirates is assembled, each of whom carries her own secrets, and […]
It Lurks in the Night
It Lurks in the Night (Disney Hyperion) by Sarah Dass continues the T&T author’s tradition of drawing on Caribbean folklore to create intensely plotted, dynamic worlds for her young adult characters. In It Lurks in the Night, the newest in Dass’s books for the Rick Riordan Presents series, a troupe of girls struggle to recover […]
Whose Child Are You?
Whose Child Are You? (self-published) by Yvonne Bobb-Smith frames a nonagenarian’s remarkable life as an author, librarian, educator, and humanist, encompassing numerous journeys made between Trinidad and Tobago and Canada. Writing candidly about the inner workings of both professional and personal life, Bobb-Smith reflects on the critical role of activism in Caribbean and wider communities, […]
The Church of Mastery
A Good Haunting and Other Stories
A Good Haunting and Other Stories (Akashic Books) by Carol Mitchell is the author’s debut short story collection, comprising of ten fiction pieces rooted in magical realism, drawing on the traditions of African and Caribbean storytelling.
And Then Begin Again
And Then Begin Again (Guernica Editions) by H. Nigel Thomas, volume four of the author’s No Safeguards quartet, centres Millington and Jay’s seemingly idyllic marriage, which is itself no stranger to secrets.
Before the Rain
Before the Rain (Peepal Tree Press) by Christine Craig combines poetry and short fiction to evoke a palpable sense of Jamaica in all its power and history, with an emphasis on both people and place.
Behold
Behold (Peepal Tree Press) by Shara McCallum, the newest collection of poems by the winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, assembles Jamaican childhood memories alongside migration narratives.
Boys Have Dreams Too
Boys Have Dreams Too (LMH Publishing) by Orlando Grant presents themes of resilience, mentorship, and holistic male development through the journey of an adversity-beset youth with ambitions of serving Jamaica.
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl (Graywolf Press) by Mandy-Suzanne Wong gathers essays on the interior lives of nonhuman invertebrates, prompting closer examinations of humanity’s empathy.
Die the Long Day
Die the Long Day (Peepal Tree Press) by Orlando Patterson, a Caribbean Modern Classics novel, is set on an 18th-century Jamaican plantation, framing a nuanced and complex portrait of the master-slave relationship.
Equinox
Equinox (New Directions) by Kamau Brathwaite, completed before the late writer’s death in 2020, is a masterful collection of poems exemplifying his ideas of “tidalectics”, tracing currents of meaning and sound between human history and the natural world.