Silence and Resistance
Silence and Resistance: Memoir of a Girlhood in Haiti (Wordeee) by Haitian Monique Clesca delves into family secrets, historical trauma, and the painful necessity of confronting the most difficult truths. This haunting memoir orbits two catastrophes: the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and shattered many Haitians’ fragile sense of stability, and Clesca’s discovery of an […]
Starry Starry Night
Starry Starry Night (Book*hug Press) by Shani Mootoo, the new novel by the acclaimed Irish-Trinidadian-Canadian author, takes us to Trinidad in the 1960s, the decade of Independence — equally formative years for Anju Ghoshal, Mootoo’s surrogate in this work of autofiction. As a new nation struggles to emerge into its postcolonial identity, so does Anju […]
The Boy Kingdom
The Boy Kingdom/El Reino de los Varones (Beacon Press) by Cuban-American Achy Obejas collects a sequence of prose poems, in both English and Spanish, meditating on childhood, parenthood, and the complexities of family. The “Boy Kingdom” of the title refers to the emotional world the author shares with her two sons — similar in many […]
The Birthday Cake
Towns and Villages of Trinidad and Tobago
Fugitive Tilts
Fugitive Tilts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson is the Jamaican poet’s debut book of essays, composed in a tone at once meditative and expansive, as Hutchinson muses on history, race, travel, and his life in reading. The sea, as ancestral repository and pervasive metaphor, reoccurs in several of the essays—as cautionary tale, as […]
Putting Myself Together
Putting Myself Together (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Antiguan-American Jamaica Kincaid gathers selected nonfiction writings from the acclaimed author, spanning 1974 to the present day. What emerges is a nuanced, frank and often disarming portrait of Kincaid in her own language and on her own terms, whether she speaks of her move to New York […]
The Quiet Ear
The Quiet Ear (Hogarth/Weidenfeld and Nicholson) by Raymond Antrobus maps and documents the author’s life in deafness, reframing that reality not as a detriment, but as an aid. Antrobus, of English and Jamaican parentage, details his diagnosis of deafness at the age of four, and the frequent societal disbelief—or worse, scorn—in which his condition was […]
A Different Hurricane
A Different Hurricane (Dundurn Press) by H Nigel Thomas presents the realities of LGBTQI+ discrimination, seen through the experiences of two young men who must flee their homophobic circumstances in St Vincent, to seek better but separate lives. When they return, Gordon and Allan do not emerge into society as themselves; they elect to rejoin […]
Caribbean Herbalism
Caribbean Herbalism: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Herbal Healing (Ulysses Press) by land steward and ethnobotanist Aleya Fraser is a rich and immersive guide into the medicinal realities of our own Caribbean plants, many of which remain unknown to most contemporary urban-dwelling citizens. Drawing on Trinidad and Tobago’s numerous flora resources, Fraser showcases over 40 herbs […]
Dante’s Inferno
Dante’s Inferno: A New Translation (Carcanet Press), by former Poet Laureate of Jamaica Lorna Goodison reconstitutes the 14th century narrative, so it is told in both Jamaican Patois and Jamaican English. Goodison’s Dante proceeds through the caverns of the underworld, guided by none other than the iconic Louise Bennett, “Miss Lou”. Other inspiring and well-known […]
Honeysuckle and Bone
Honeysuckle and Bone, by Trisha Tobias (Sweet July Books) unfolds on the Jamaican estate of the wealthy and prestigious Hall clan. Fleeing her own family, 18-year-old Carina Marshall accepts a position as an au pair for the Halls at their imposing residence, Blackbead Estate. Carina hopes that a relocation to her mother’s island of Jamaica […]
Quiet Dawn
Quiet Dawn (Duke University Press) by Jean-Claude Fignolé, translated from French by Kaiama L Glover and Laurent Dubois, now appears for the first time in English since its original 1990 publication. Charting Haiti’s unprecedented history-making journey from French colony to independent black republic, Fignolé’s expansive storyline encompasses Haitian life at the turn of the 18th […]
Guaracara
Guaracara (Carcanet Press) by Fawzia Muradali Kane focuses on Indo-Caribbean experience, distilled in poems that speak of sugar cane and oil refinery histories in Trinidad. In the13-poem movement ‘Let Us Mourn the Death of King Sugar’, the reader is addressed by the collective voice of King Sugar itself, speaking directly and often in dramatic resonances […]
Layaway Child
Her debut short story collection, Layaway Child, will be published by House of Anansi in 2026.
Paradise Once
Paradise Once (Akashic Books), the newest historical novel by Jamaican author Olive Senior, emphasises the importance of the indigenous Taíno people in the Caribbean. Senior, who won the overall 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, focuses the narrative of Paradise Once on four survivors of a massacre. Imbuing their journeys with a mixture of […]
Sparrow Take Over
Sparrow Take Over: Essays on the Bard’s Art (StarApple Books), edited by Donna Benny: this gathering of critical essays and commentary brings the legacy of the Calypso King of the World soaring to life. Well-timed to usher in the 90th birthday of Slinger Francisco himself, Sparrow Take Over features contributions from Marina Salandy-Brown, Anu Lakhan, […]
The Snag
The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief, by Tessa McWatt (Penguin Random House Canada/Scribe Publications) is an ecological memoir by the 2020 winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Nonfiction). The work combines McWatt’s chronicle of her mother’s dementia prognosis with the degradation of the natural ecosystems sustaining human life. As […]
Mixing Memory and Desire
Tantie Diablesse
Heirloom
Heirloom (Carcanet Press) by Catherine-Esther Cowie maps generations of St Lucian women’s stories in poems, across the colonial and postcolonial history of that island. Employing Kwéyòl and nation language, Cowie examines the persistence of violence, fear, and faith in mother-daughter relationships, using evocative language to illustrate their spiritual connections. Through each woman’s quest for autonomous […]
Lost and Found
Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean (Papillote Press), written and edited by Alison Donnell, excavates and reclaims the work of numerous Caribbean women writers, whose creative legacies were often overshadowed — or given no recognition at all — in comparison with their famous male colleagues. This book of prodigious […]
Other Worlds
Other Worlds (Penguin Random House Canada) by André Alexis takes its reader on a narrative and stylistic saga, introducing them to a Trinidadian Obeah man, a writer saddled with an unusual caretaker’s position, and a host of inventive characters. The short stories that comprise Other Worlds are by turns playful and transgressive, using both Western […]
The Devil’s Horsewhip
The Devil’s Horsewhip (Barbican Press) by Damion Spencer is a visceral debut novel-in-stories, an exploration of death and darkness in the lives of characters who have evaded that ultimate fate once before. Bringing Jamaican folklore and ritual to bear on its protagonists’ fates with a chilling immediacy, The Devil’s Horsewhip keeps one foot in the […]
The Proper Care of Knives
The Proper Care of Knives (Argotiers Press) is Anu Lakhan’s full-length poetry debut, in which an animist compulsion for the natural world illuminates human preoccupations with wild forms. Characterised by their brevity and the force of their impact, the poems in The Proper Care of Knives do not shy away from the complexity of interpersonal […]
An Unending Search
A Quiet Disappearance
A Quiet Disappearance (Mawenzi House) by Rabindranath Maharaj assembles short stories whose central characters are preoccupied with the relentless onward march of time. Containing as its epigraph a brief quote from Virginia Woolf that says, “I should like to tidy things up and disappear,” each story in the collection delves deep into the inner lives […]
Death Register
Ever Since We Small
Dark Laboratory
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Penguin Random House) by Tao Leigh Goffe explores the malign influence of European-driven colonization on the Caribbean, and its direct effects on our present climate catastrophe. Combining history with reportage, Dark Laboratory maps the origins of this predatory extraction to Columbus’ 1492 […]