The Chaos
The Chaos (New Walk Editions) is the debut poetry pamphlet by 2021 First Citizens National Poetry Slam winner Derron Sandy. The pieces will be familiar to fans of Sandy’s spoken word repertoire, examining themes of sovereignty and systemic inequity, displacement and urban violence. No easy or tidy solutions are proposed to the endemic problems the […]
Black Light Void
Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean (Hansib Publications), edited by Marsha Pearce, assembles six short stories by prizewinning T&T writers in response to the art of Edward Bowen. These new pieces, by Kevin Jared Hosein, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Millar, Amílcar Sanatan, Portia Subran and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, use ekphrasis to examine and comment on […]
Santa Tarantula
Santa Tarantula (University of Notre Dame Press) by Jordan Pérez, is the winner of the tenth Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Anchoring themselves in Cuban history and identity, the poems range from covering minorities abuse in Camagüey’s forced labour camps of the 1960s, to women striving to live fearlessly in the aftermath of sexual assault. Tracking […]
Masman
A Literary Friendship
A Literary Friendship (Peepal Tree Press) by the late Gordon Rohlehr traverses some fifty years of the author’s correspondence with, and musings on, the life and work of poet Kamau Brathwaite, assembling a testament to Caribbean literary citizenship and camaraderie.
Amazing Scenes
Amazing Scenes: Selected Journalism 1928-1953 (Peepal Tree Press) by Seepersad Naipaul, edited by Aaron Eastley, Nivedita Misra, Kenneth Ramchand and the late Brinsley Samaroo, views Naipaul’s journalistic career through the lens of shaping Caribbean social history, particularly in the Indo-Caribbean community.
Broughtupsy
Broughtupsy (House of Anansi, Canada; Catapult, US) by Christina Cooke spotlights a burgeoning intimate relationship between Akúa and Jayda, in a Jamaica where attitudes towards LGBTQ+ identities are emotionally mercurial.
Chasing the Marbleu
Chasing the Marbleu (Peepal Tree Press) by prolific Trinidad-born Guyanese poet Ian McDonald, takes stock of a life diversely and richly lived, gathering remembrances of family, homegoings and homecomings, principally steeped in an appreciative Caribbeanness that transcends mere patriotism.
Code Noir
Code Noir (Penguin Random House Canada) the debut work of fiction from 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature winner Canisia Lubrin, links fifty-nine fragmentary episodes responding to King Louis XIV’s Code Noir.
Colonial Countryside
Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree Press), edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting, gathers commissioned poetry and fiction writing responding to UK National Trust houses bearing direct ties to the slave trade: the anthology includes work by 2023 OCM Bocas Prize winner Ayanna Lloyd Banwo.
Edgar Mittelholzer
Edgar Mittelholzer: In the Eye of the Storm (Peepal Tree Press), edited by Juanita Cox, curates essays engaging with the lauded Guyanese writer’s positions on race, genre mastery, formal proficiency, alongside charges that Mittelholzer wrote pornography.
Look At You
Look At You (Peepal Tree Press) by Amanda Smyth marries pathos and humour in its examination of a life roving between Trinidad and the United Kingdom, striving towards understanding a girl, then woman’s, place in the world amidst sometimes-competing narratives.
Naniki
Naniki (Dundurn Press) by Oonya Kempadoo channels First People’s knowledge, presenting an elemental world in which protagonists Amana and Skelele contend with environmental devastation on their quest towards a spirit-infused Caribbean.
Oh Witness Dey!
Oh Witness Dey! (Book*hug Press) by Shani Mootoo uses poetry to reconstruct a body of belonging, focusing on the incomplete records of indentureship in the Indo-Caribbean world and its diaspora, asking questions of inheritance, possession, and harmony.
Polkadot Wounds
Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet Press) by Anthony Vahni Capildeo addresses the multitudinous emotional responses brought about by living in the world’s anthropocene, ranging from places, stations and perspectives with virtuosic density.
The House of Plain Truth
The House of Plain Truth (Zibby Media), Donna Hemans’s second novel, triangulates Jamaica, Brooklyn, and Cuba as it navigates a family’s tempestuous journey through migration, caregiving, and traumatic sibling dynamics.
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh (Faber), Ingrid Persaud’s second novel, tackles the infamous gangster who terrorised Trinidad and Tobago in the 1940s and 50s, as told through the voices of four women, Popo, Mana Lala, Doris, and Rosie.
The Nightward
The Nightward (Harper Voyager) by R.S.A Garcia, framed as a reading experience in which Caribbean mythos meets The Witcher, melds fantasy and science fiction to treat with tropes of encroaching technologies, warrior women, and precocious savant children.
Village Weavers
Village Weavers (Tin House) by Myriam J. A. Chancy foregrounds a decades-old friendship in fiction, one that endures political devastation, sweeping social change, and the tumultuous span of sixty years marked by resettlement in the United States.
A History of Modern Trinidad 1783-1962
Breaking Free
The Animated Universe
Abeni’s Song
Abeni’s Song (Macmillan) is the first in an epic adventure-fantasy series for readers aged eight to twelve, by American-Trinidadian novelist P. Djèlí Clark. Young Abeni is thrust into an unplanned-for magical apprenticeship which she resents but cannot avoid, if she is to secure the future of her besieged fellow villagers. During her tutelage, a cohort […]
All Made of Longing
All Made of Longing (Bamboo Talk Press), the debut poetry collection by Guyanese singer-songwriter and musician Ruth Osman, presents a broad swathe of human emotion, perceived through a feminist, womanist, and sensualist lens. Osman’s poems contain an innate lyrical quality, when speaking of both romantic and familial love. A similar richness is employed when the […]
Elektrik
Elektrik: Caribbean Writing, An Anthology of Eight Female Writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe (Two Lines Press) commits itself to the vision of representing underheard voices from the Francophone Caribbean world. Assembling the creative writing of eight women authors — Gaël Octavia, Fabienne Kanor, Marie-Célie Agnant, Kettly Mars, Suzanne Dracius, Mireille Jean-Gilles, Adlyne Bonhomme, and […]
School of Instructions
US-based Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s third collection, School of Instructions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), began as a commission investigating the experiences of West Indian soldiers during the First World War. The book developed this research into a wide-ranging meditation that encompasses boyhood, martial rule, civil unrest, and coming of age in perilous eras. Hutchinson’s methodological […]
We Are the Crisis
We Are the Crisis (Blackstone Publishing), the sequel to US Virgin Islander Cadwell Turnbull’s speculative thriller No Gods, No Monsters, catapults readers back into the heart of the action created by an emergence of mythological creatures into human society. Following the grisly events labelled “The Monster Massacre”, political factions are drawn between those on either […]