Tameisha’s Adventure
A Stranger in the Citadel
A Stranger in the Citadel (Tachyon Publications) by Grenada-raised Tobias Buckell presents a compassionate allegory for humanity’s peaceful coexistence and survival, through the lens of speculative fiction. Focusing on the thorny relationship between a warrioress who has never seen a book, and a fugitive librarian fleeing dangerous reprisals, A Stranger in the Citadel is awash […]
Cowboy
Cowboy (Cheerio Publishing), the debut poetry collection by Kandace Siobhan Walker, contains references to the writer’s Canadian, Jamaican, Gullah-Geechee, and Welsh heritages. Exploring place and identity through radical viewpoints, Walker’s poems are electrifying witnesses to a tumultuous coming of age. Navigating the often-deleterious effects of internet culture against the shifting certainties of locations, Cowboy is […]
How to Say Babylon
How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster), the debut memoir by Safiya Sinclair, winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, is a tempestuous reckoning with the author’s Rastafari upbringing beneath the yoke of a didactic patriarch. Sinclair juxtaposes the natural beauty of her girlhood’s Jamaican landscape with the strict, often punitive edicts issued […]
Pay As You Go
Pay As You Go (McSweeney’s), the debut novel by Trinidad-born Eskor David Johnson, propels a protagonist with a shifty past through the fictional city of Polis, chronicling his survival through witty and often madcap stratagems. Pay As You Go contemplates the possibilities of abundant aliveness in desperate circumstances, fuelled by Johnson’s urbane and reflective approach […]
The Box
The Box (Graywolf Press) by Bermudian Mandy-Suzanne Wong employs experimental storytelling to underpin larger notions of bodily autonomy and freedom in a heavily conscribed world. The novel’s plot hinges on a seemingly impenetrable box which falls into the hands of a chronic hermit, thereupon passed among a series of personages who will be affected by […]
Tales of Root, Silk, & Bone
The Caribbean Writer
For the Unnamed
For the Unnamed (Carcanet Press) by British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar presents the reimagined history of a famous Black jockey who won the race of a lifetime, guiding José Sepulveda’s horse Black Swan in a victory against Pio Pico’s horse Sarco on March 20, 1852. While the race itself helped to solidify early Los Angeles adulation […]
The Zaboca Tree
The Zaboca Tree (self-published), the third collection of short stories by Ken Jaikaransingh, set after 1945, continues the Trinidadian author’s trajectory of social and political commentary on T&T’s development. The characters — a motley and occasionally vagabond crew — find themselves thrust into an arena of uncertainty and misrule, as competing factors vie for prominence […]
Whale Aria
Whale Aria (Four Way Books), the fourth full-length collection of poems by American-Guyanese writer Rajiv Mohabir, creates parallels between the migratory patterns of humpback whales and the immigrant journeys conducted by brown and queer human travellers. Making a study of the languages used by whales to communicate at submarine depths, Mohabir likens cetacean speech to […]
What Start Bad a Mornin’
What Start Bad a Mornin’ (Central Avenue Publishing), the debut adult novel by CaribbeanReads Publishing founder Carol Mitchell, spans locations in Virginia, Washington, DC, Trinidad, and Jamaica, contending with a forty-year-old diaspora Caribbean woman’s quest to heal from the suppressed trauma ingrained in her life. The journeys undertaken by Mitchell’s protagonist, Amaya, are as mental […]
You Were Watching from the Sand
You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press), the debut publication of Haitian author Juliana Lamy, delves into the inner lives of Haitians at home and in the diaspora, exposing characters to the psychological repercussions of bizarre happenings that defy easy explanation. Undercurrents of the supernatural and ritualistic run through these short stories, which […]
Goodbye Bay
If You Read This
From Kereen Getten, winner of the inaugural Bocas Lit Fest Children’s Book Prize, comes a coming-of-age novel for young readers, If You Read This (Yearling). Focusing on Brie, who mourns her mother’s death by remembering the treasure hunt games they played together, the book investigates themes of loss, remembering, and reconciliation. Brie is reunited with […]
River Mumma
River Mumma (Penguin Canada), the highly-anticipated second book from Zalika Reid-Benta, follows a spirited narrator in the throes of a quarter-life crisis, set against Toronto’s bustling urban backdrop. Beleaguered by her lack of prospects, Alicia is astonished when the Jamaican deity River Mumma presents herself with a mission; what ensues is a madcap adventure involving […]
The Blue, Beautiful World
The Blue, Beautiful World (Del Rey) by Barbadian speculative fiction writer Karen Lord sets a superstar cast of would-be heroes against the impending promise of Earth’s First Contact with an alien species. From rockstars to diplomats, scientists to military personnel, The Blue, Beautiful World not only serves an unforgettable cast of characters, it explores the […]
The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes
The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes (University of Notre Dame Press) by Cuban-American poet Victoria María Castells channels fairytale and folklore to report on the environmental crises gripping the Caribbean. An inventive blend of speculative and journalistic elements, this debut poetry collection centres Cuba’s landscape and history, remarking on generations of conquest, and the struggle […]
Bath of Herbs
Bath of Herbs (Peepal Tree Press), the debut poetry collection by Emily Zobel Marshall, is a feminist exploration of self, mixed-race identity, and the healing powers afforded by an immersion in nature. Zobel Marshall, the granddaughter of famed Martiniquan writer Joseph Zobel, explores the repercussions of such an indelible literary legacy, while simultaneously forging and […]
Console
Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Colin Channer contains poems that explore etymologies of sound, including elements of confessional, explorative, and philosophical verse. Global in their scope, the narratives of the poems move from New England to the Caribbean, focused on the shifting realities of the Anthropocene with both playfulness and stoicism that avoid a […]
Sister Mother Warrior
Sister Mother Warrior (William Morrow), a new historical novel of the Haitian Revolution by Vanessa Riley, focuses on two indomitable women: Haiti’s first Empress, Marie-Claire Bonheur, and West Africa-born warrior of the rebellion, Gran Toya. Riley purposefully frames infamous historical events through feminist eyes. In so doing, she offers a recalibration of how history is […]
Sufferah
Sufferah: The Memoir of a Brixton Reggae-Head (Akashic Books), by Alex Wheatle, chronicles the extraordinary life of one of the most renowned Black British writers. Wheatle’s account of his traumatic childhood, tumultuous upbringing, and salvation through reggae music is candid and unsparing. Sufferah does not shy away from the entrenched racism and xenophobia embedded in […]
The Wanderers
The Wanderers (Bathohiya), a dual poetry collection by Satnarine Balkaransingh featuring thirty poems by his late brother Lal Balkaransingh, covers numerous aspects of Indo-Caribbean culture, and more broadly, of the Trinidad and Tobago historical journey since the First Peoples. Drawing on Balkaransingh’s training as a Kathak classical dancer, many of the poems retain innate musicality, […]
Born on an Island
Archipelagos
Archipelagos (Peepal Tree Press), the eighth book of poems by US-based Jamaican Geoffrey Philp, begins with a vision of Columbus and his crew arriving in the Caribbean “spurred by fever” for gold and conquest, and ends with a quotation from Bob Marley: “We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.” The poems collected between these poles […]
Mayaro Gold
Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony (Ian Randle Publishers) by Roydon Salick is, surprisingly, the first book-length study of Anthony’s novels and short stories, and an overdue milestone in Caribbean literary criticism. Salick argues that in his memorable characters, deeply rooted sense of place, and ear for distinctively Trinidadian voices, Anthony offers a politically […]
Nightmare Island
Nightmare Island (Scholastic Press), the latest children’s book by Barbadian Shakirah Bourne — a finalist for the 2018 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature — draws on Caribbean mythology to create a thrilling story about family bonds. When her younger brother is taken away for treatment on mysterious Duppy Island, and a haunting […]
Song for My Father
In his memoir Song for My Father (Ian Randle Publishers), Grenadian Brian Samuel recounts a family story that is unique but simultaneously typical of complicated, border-crossing Caribbean lives. As Samuel explains, by the time he turned eighteen, he and his two brothers had lived in Grenada, Trinidad, Guyana, Britain, and the United States, but the […]
Carmody Road
The third in a non-fiction trilogy, Carmody Road (Paria Publishing) by Robin McDonald documents a coming-of-age childhood in St. Augustine, Trinidad, told with both nostalgic humour and a keen sensibility of place. Carmody Road follows Beloved and Archie, memoirs of Robin McDonald’s parents, Thelma Seheult and Archie McDonald, building on the insights and revelations of […]
It Waits in the Forest
Dass’s third novel, It Waits in the Forest, will be published by Disney Books in 2024.