Books Archive • Page 2 of 5 • Bocas Lit Fest

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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.

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.

My Bones and My Flute

Mittelholzer subtitled his 1955 novel “A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner”, and there is more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek in this thoroughly entertaining work, though it rises to a pitch of genuine terror and has serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery that still echo into the […]

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.

Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew)

Set in a small Haitian village called Fonds-Rouge, this classic of Caribbean literature has been translated into many languages since first published in French in 1944.

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.

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.

El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World)

El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) is a novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier, published in 1949 in his native Spanish. First published in English translation in 1957, The Kingdom of This World is now widely recognised as a masterpiece of Cuban and Caribbean literature. A work of historical fiction, it tells the story of Haiti before, during, […]

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: a novel in bass riddim

Cereus Blooms at Night

Set on a fictional Caribbean island in the town of Paradise, Cereus Blooms at Night unveils the mystery surrounding Mala Ramchandin and the tempestuous history of her family. At the heart of this bold and seductive novel is an alleged crime committed many years before the story opens.