Fireflies in Winter
Fireflies in Winter (Berkley) by Eleanor Shearer centres on Cora and Agnes, two girls from wildly disparate backgrounds who must contend with a dangerous Nova Scotian winter of 1796.
Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales
Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales (Peepal Tree Press) by Seepersad Naipaul, issued as part of the press’ Caribbean Modern Classics series, presents a pioneering selection of stories in which Indian Caribbean voices write about themselves.
Here Lies a Ghost
Here Lies a Ghost (Scholastic Press) by Shakirah Bourne puts a Barbadian spin on a classic ghost tale, combining an adolescent hazing ritual with the island’s colonial past.
P FKN R
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke University Press) by Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau spotlights the musical superstar’s radicalising influence on his country’s sociopolitical present and future.
Riddled
Riddled (Peepal Tree Press) by Tanya Shirley, the poet’s third collection, brings Shirley’s signature humour and eroticism to bear on new work, steeped in sensuality and life’s myriad complications.
Sky City
Sky City (Jonathan Cape) by Jacqueline Crooks depicts life in 1990s London, a sometimes-harsh backdrop for the unexpected intersections of three lives, entangled by music, fate, and the persistent echoes of the past.
The Bush Tea Murder
The Bush Tea Murder (Crooked Lane Books) by Ashley-Ruth Bernier follows the machinations of an amateur sleuth on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, as she attempts to unwind a string of troubling home-grown criminal cases.
Virgin Islands Noir
Virgin Islands Noir (Akashic Books), edited by Tiphanie Yanique and Richard Georges, brings together stories from the British and US Virgin Islands, featuring contributions by Cadwell Turnbull, Tobias S. Buckell, Gillian Royes, and others.
We’ve Been Here Before
We’ve Been Here Before (Dundurn Press) by Myrtle Henry Sodhi charts an intergenerational saga between Canada and the Caribbean, drawing on elements of West African spirituality, Catholicism, and ancestral knowledge.
Saga Boy
After Caliban
After Caliban (Duke University Press), by Erica Moiah James studies the methodology and impact of several Caribbean artists of the 1990s who gained prominence in the global art world, through the lens of decolonization. The work takes its impetus from Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the previously-maligned antagonist Caliban emerges as […]
An Unconquerable Spirit
An Unconquerable Spirit (Ian Randle Publishers), by Helen Francis-Seaman chronicles the resistance of the Kalinago, Garifuna and Maroon communities across the eastern Caribbean. Subtitled “The Indigenous Resistance to Colonisation in the Caribbean Windward Islands”, An Unconquerable Spirit seeks to dismantle imperialist versions of history, by focusing on the uncredited heroes of indigenous peoples, predominantly in […]
Beyond Borders
Beyond Borders, the autobiography of business magnate Arthur Lok Jack, paints a convincing, credible portrait of a life dedicated to innovation. Lok Jack documents his humble beginnings as the child of Chinese and Indian small shopkeepers, illustrating how his early leanings towards entrepreneurship were instinctive. Beyond Borders provides compelling insight behind the personal and professional […]
Concrete Dreams
Concrete Dreams (Peepal Tree Press), by Ferdinand Dennis traverses some forty years of life in Caribbean-shaped Britain, grounded in the disharmonious relationship between brutish Lucas Bostock and his wife, Rhoda. A story of intense familial disenfranchisement, Concrete Dreams is an often-painful exploration of the Windrush era, and the struggle for selfhood and identity it engendered […]
The Hidden Island
The Hidden Island (Ig Publishing), by Abraham Jiménez Enoa situates its concerns in the lives of everyday Cubans, most of them struggling to eke out an existence against bleakly oppressive odds. These essays take contemporary Cuba out of the frame of an idyllic tourist destination, going behind those fabrications to showcase the grim realities of […]
Bain de Lune
Passagères de nuit
The Tempest
Cricket’s First Revolutionary
Cricket’s First Revolutionary: Frank Worrell’s Political War Against Colonialism in the West Indies (Ian Randle Publishers) by UWI Vice Chancellor Hilary McD. Beckles is a biographical study of the celebrated Barbadian cricketer focused on his intellectual and political impact — specifically, his career-long anticolonial activism. Worrell “dismantled the colonial elite order of West Indies cricket […]
Other Wild
Other Wild (Peepal Tree Press) by Emily Zobel Marshall is the second poetry collection by the writer of French Caribbean and British heritage. Here the living natural world — forests, rivers, mountains — is both real landscape and metaphor for intense spiritual and emotional wildness, and the restless quest for personal sovereignty. Closely observed and […]
The House in Bacolet
The House in Bacolet (Peepal Tree Press), the debut novel by T&T-born David Lambert, is both an intimate portrait of a marriage and a compelling exploration of cultural difference, set in the contemporary Caribbean. It opens with a British couple, Hugh and Julia, arriving in Tobago, having bought a former church to convert into a […]
The World After Rain
The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem (McClelland & Stewart), the third collection of poems by St. Lucia-born Canisia Lubrin, is an “incandescent” elegy for the poet’s mother, meditating on love and grief, memory and history. “The poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements,” says […]
This Is the Only Kingdom
This Is the Only Kingdom (Algonquin Books), the first novel by Jaquira Díaz, is a portrait of family and community set in a working-class neighbourhood in Puerto Rico. Maricarmen and her daughter Nena struggle to make a life for themselves, supported by their neighbours after the death of Nena’s father — until a murder investigation […]
Mourir est beau
Scarlet Birthright
Sixty Years of Independence
A Ruin, Great and Free
A Ruin, Great and Free (Blackstone) by Cadwell Turnbull is the third and final volume in the US Virgin Islands writer’s Convergence Saga, which began with No Gods, No Monsters and continued in We Are the Crisis. Set in a world where monsters of myth and legend reveal their existence to the world with calamitous […]
Ground Provisions
Ground Provisions (Peepal Tree Press), the debut book of poems by Jamaica-born, US-based Shauna Morgan, uses a deep engagement with the natural world to grapple with the making and remaking of uprooted and transplanted selves. These poems “interrogate power, follow the desire for freedom, explore the necessity of ancestral memory, and answer the crucial need […]
In Defense of Dabbling
In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur (Broadleaf Books) by Karen Walrond is the Trinidad-born writer and leadership coach’s third book. Like its predecessors, it hovers pleasingly between the genres of personal essay and self-help — in this case, exploring the value of being an “intentional amateur.” Curiosity, mindfulness, selfcompassion, play, […]
Seabeast
Seabeast (Four Way Books), the fifth full-length book of poems by Guyanese-American Rajiv Mohabir, takes the form of a bestiary, a catalogue of creatures — specifically, of whale species. The complicated, sometimes violent, and occasionally heartbreaking relations between the human and the nonhuman are the meat of these poems, which journey between the strange and […]