Country of Warm Snow
Country of Warm Snow (Shearsman), a collection of poems by Mervyn Taylor, “seeks to represent the duality of a life lived in two places at once” — those two places being Trinidad, the island of the poet’s birth, and the United States, where he has lived for most of the past five decades. “To combat […]
Polar Vortex
The sixth novel by Trinidadian-Canadian Shani Mootoo, Polar Vortex (Akashic Books) is a suspenseful story of desire, secrets, and an unexpected love triangle. Priya and Alex, a lesbian couple who have moved to rural Canada, find their trust and expectations disrupted by the arrival of a visitor from Priya’s past, forcing all three into a […]
The Assassination of Maurice Bishop
The Assassination of Maurice Bishop (Ian Randle Publishers), a gripping and chilling book by Belizean author Godfrey Smith, is a detailed account of the final days of the charismatic leader of the Grenada Revolution, killed in October 1983 under circumstances that traumatised a generation of Caribbean activists. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews, some […]
Dominoes at the Crossroads
I Even Regret Night
King and the Dragonflies
Reproduction
Shame on Me
Black Spartacus
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a new biography by the Mauritius-born, Oxford-based historian Sudhir Hazareesingh, has been called by one critic “by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time.” Drawing on scattered archival sources to […]
Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall (UWI Press) by Annie Paul, the latest book in the publisher’s ongoing Caribbean Biography series, is a short, accessible life of the celebrated Jamaica-born scholar, a pioneer in the academic field of cultural studies. Based in Britain for most of his career, Hall developed an international reputation for his groundbreaking ideas, but recognition […]
Love After Love
Tea by the Sea
My Favourite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog
Newly translated from the Spanish, the novel My Favourite Girlfriend Was a French Bulldog (McSweeney’s) by Cuban writer Legna Rodríguez Iglesias is a novel in the form of fifteen linked stories which “creates an unsparing multigenerational portrait” of Cuba. Touching on issues of family, feminism, and political and sexual identity, the novel turns a classic […]
of colour
In her debut book of colour (Essay Press), US-based Trinidadian-Ghanaian writer Katherine Agyemaa Agard offers “an experimental essay about colour, hybridity, and art-making.” Investigating race and sexuality though a hybrid identity, of colour is described as both memoir and manifesto, an exploration of self that comes to no easy conclusions.
One Year of Ugly
One Year of Ugly (The Borough Press), the debut novel by Trinidadian Caroline Mackenzie, is a sly, zippy dark comedy set in contemporary T&T, combining elements of romance and crime fiction. The extended Palacios family, Venezuelan migrants living comfortably though illegally in Trinidad, become entangled with a local crime boss named Ugly, following the death […]
A Tall History of Sugar
Patsy
New Voices
New Voices (UWI Press) is an anthology featuring poems by twenty-six emerging Jamaican writers, all of whom were winners of or shortlistees for the Poet Laureate of Jamaica Prizes for Poetry from 2017 to 2020. Selected by Jamaica’s current Poet Laureate, Lorna Goodison, these pieces suggest numerous future directions for Jamaican poetry, various in theme […]
Passport to Here and There
In her new book of poems Passport to Here and There (Bloodaxe), her ninth, the eminent writer Grace Nichols describes a personal journey from her childhood in rural Guyana through her migration as an adult to the United Kingdom and her present adopted home in Sussex. The book “embraces connections and re-connections,” writes its publisher, […]
The Sea Needs No Ornament
The new bilingual anthology The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento (Peepal Tree), edited and translated by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan, is a groundbreaking collection of poems by thirty-three women writers from the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Diverse in subject, form, and voice, the anthology includes Trinidadian writers Danielle […]
Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Queenie
Book of the Little Axe
Book of the Little Axe (Atlantic Monthly Press), the second historical novel by Trinidadian-American Lauren Francis-Sharma, opens in Trinidad in 1796, when the island passes from Spanish to British colonial rule, and moves to the Native American Crow Nation in Montana, as it recounts a story of family, ancestry, birthright, and freedom.
Clap When You Land
Loss, love, and forgiveness are key themes in Clap When You Land (HarperCollins), a verse novel by Dominican-American writer Elizabeth Acevedo. Two sisters, separated by deception — one in the Dominican Republic, the other in New York — discover their unknown bond in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Modern, Age, &c
Modern, Age, &c. (Peepal Tree), the latest poetry collection from Trinidadian Raymond Ramcharitar, offers “ferociously satiric views of the Modern Caribbean, Modern Journalism, and a world inhabited by Trump and Jong Un,” according to the publisher.
My Mother’s House
My Mother’s House (Knopf), the debut novel by Haitian-born Francesca Momplaisir, is a dark, disturbing literary thriller, exploring the dangerous legacies of violence and racism through the experience of a Haitian family migrating to New York in search of refuge and prosperity.
The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana
The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana (World Editions) is the latest novel by Guadeloupean Maryse Condé — winner of the 2018 “alternative Nobel” New Academy Prize in Literature — to appear in translation. Through the story of twins with a powerful and perilous bond, the novel explores racism, terrorism, and how global […]
Golden Child
