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 most consequential disruption came in 1960, when his mother — a Scottish nurse who had migrated to the West Indies with her Grenadian husband — left the family without warning. Samuel’s devotion to his father is clear, as is his sense of the personal transformation that ensued when the now single-parented family moved to Jamaica in 1971, a time of creative and political ferment.