On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.

Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—"A Brief History of Seven Killings" is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 70s, to the crack wars in 80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 90s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James’ place among the great literary talents of his generation.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean.

The Book of Jamaica

Madison Daniels has worshiped her brother's best friend since they were kids. Everyone thinks she and Chase Gamble would make the perfect couple, but there are two major flaws in their logic. 1) Chase has sworn off relationships of any kind and 2) after blurring the line between friends and lovers for one night four years ago, they can't stop bickering.

 Forced together for her brother's wedding getaway, Chase and Madison decide to call a truce for the happy couple. Except all bets are off when they're forced to shack up in a tacky '70s honeymoon suite and survive a multitude of "accidents" as the family tries to prove their "spark" can be used for more than fighting. That is, if they don't strangle each other first...

Tempting the Best Man (Gamble Brothers, #1)

"Wide Sargasso Sea", a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With "Wide Sargasso Sea", her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre". This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

A new introduction by the award-winning Edwidge Danticat, author most recently of "Claire of the Sea Light", expresses the enduring importance of this work. Drawing on her own Caribbean background, she illuminates the setting’s impact on Rhys and her astonishing work.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Rachel Manley, granddaughter and daughter of two of Jamaica's national leaders, tells the story of the brilliant, artistic Manleys - Jamaica's most prominent and glamorous political family - and the house that nurtured them: Drumblair. This is a world vividly recreated, and an intimate memoir of the people who changed Jamaica's intellectual, social and cultural landscape for all time.

Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood

Ever since "Abeng" was first published in 1984, Michelle Cliff has steadily become a literary force. Her novels evoke both the clearly delineated hierarchies of colonial Jamaica and the subtleties of present-day island life. Nowhere is her power felt more than in Clare Savage, her Jamaican heroine, who appeared, already grown, in "No Telephone to Heaven". "Abeng" is a kind of prequel to that highly-acclaimed novel and is a small masterpiece in its own right. Here Clare is twelve years old, the light-skinned daughter of a middle-class family, growing up among the complex contradictions of class versus color, blood versus history, harsh reality versus delusion, in a colonized country. In language that surrounds us with a richness of meaning and voices, the several strands of young Clare's heritage are explored: the Maroons, who used the conch shell—the abeng—to pass messages as they fought a guerilla struggle against their English enslavers; and the legacy of Clare's white great-great-grandfather, Judge Savage, who burned his hundred slaves on the eve of their emancipation. A lyrical, explosive coming-of-age story combined with a provocative retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica, this novel is a triumph.

Abeng

"The Book of Night Women" is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they and she will come to both revere and fear. 

The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. 

Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently--and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most intriguing mysteries.

The Book of Night Women

Named the Dolman Travel Book of the Year, "The Dead Yard" paints an unforgettable portrait of modern Jamaica. Since independence, Jamaica has gradually become associated with twin images--a resort-style travel Eden for foreigners and a new kind of hell for Jamaicans, a society where gangs control the areas where most Jamaicans live and drug lords like Christopher Coke rule elites and the poor alike. 

 Ian Thomson's brave book explores a country of lost promise, where America's hunger for drugs fuels a dependent economy and shadowy politics. The lauded birthplace of reggae and Bob Marley, Jamaica is now sunk in corruption and hopelessness. A synthesis of vital history and unflinching reportage, "The Dead Yard" is "a fascinating account of a beautiful, treacherous country" ("Irish Times").

The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica

"Throughout her life my mother [Doris] lived in two places at once: Kingston, Jamaica, where she raised a family of nine children, and Harvey River, in the parish of Hanover, where she was born and grew up."

In the tradition of Michael Ondaatje's "Running in the Family" and Carlos Eire's "Waiting for Snow in Havana" comes Lorna Goodison's luminous memoir of her forebears—"From Harvey River". When Doris' English grandfather, William Harvey, discovers a clearing at the end of a path cut by the feet of those running from slavery, he gives his name to what will become his family's home for generations. For Doris, Harvey River is the place she always called home, the place where she was one of the "fabulous Harvey girls" and where the rich local bounty of the land went hand in hand with the Victorian niceties and comforts of her parents' house. It is a place she will return to in dreams when her fortunes change, years later, and she and her husband, Marcus Goodison, relocate to "hard life" Kingston and encounter the harsh realities of urban living in close quarters as they raise their family of nine children.

In lush prose, Lorna Goodison weaves memory and island lore to create a vivid, universally appealing tapestry.

From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island

In the tradition "Huckleberry Finn "and "The Catcher in the Rye", Russell Banks’s quintessential novel of a disaffected homeless youth living on the edge of society “redefines the young modern anti-hero. . . . "Rule of the Bone" has its own culture and language, and Bone is sure to become a beloved character for generations” ("San Francisco Chronicle"). With a compelling, off-beat protagonist evocative of Holden Caulfield and Quentin Coldwater, and a narrative voice that masterfully and naturally captures the nuances of a modern vernacular, Banks’s haunting and powerful novel is an indisputable—and unforgettable—modern classic.

Rule of the Bone

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright, "A Small Place" magnifies our vision of one small place with Swiftian wit and precision. Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay candidly appraises the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up, and makes palpable the impact of European colonization and tourism. The book is a missive to the traveler, whether American or European, who wants to escape the banality and corruption of some large place. Kincaid, eloquent and resolute, reminds us that the Antiguan people, formerly British subjects, are unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own tiny realm—that behind the benevolent Caribbean scenery are human lives, always complex and often fraught with injustice.

A Small Place

Often referred to as a prose-poem, this book reflects an internal sociological perspective. At first, readers are outsiders, but soon they are invited into the narrative that is best understood in its totality and in the context of Jamaican history. The author breaks up the life story of Nellie, the primary narrator, into nonchronological vignettes that explore dimensions of the difficulties of the protagonist's childhood, sexuality, and search for identity under the circumstances of Jamaica's tumultuous past and colonial legacy.

Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

It is Easter 1981, and Jamaica is in a state of emergency: There is violence in the streets and police checkpoints are everywhere. Island dwellers for centuries, the Landing family has gathered to bury one of its own. Staring at the closed coffin of Lana Ramcharan, her mother and sister confront the cruelest kind of loss. Jean, who was Lana's sister and closest confidante, has always been attuned to the spirit world, and now, in the face of this latest catastrophe, the voices that have always guided her urge flight from this troubled place.As Jean makes her way across the island toward the plane waiting to take her to America and safety, she is overcome by memories, not only of Lana but also of her forebears -- African, Creole, Scottish, Indian, and Chinese. Ancestral voices tell of the hardships and wonders, of the beauty and atrocity, that are indelible parts of the Jamaican experience.

The True History of Paradise

Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of "warning": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear—people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with the mysterious "Mr. Writer Man," who has a tale of his own to share, one that will cast Adamine's life in an entirely new light. In a story about magic and migration, stories and storytelling, and the New and Old Worlds, we discover it is never one person who owns a story or has the right to tell it.

The Last Warner Woman

A collection of powerful stories by one of the masters of Russian literature, illustrating the author's thoughts on political philosophy, religion and above all, humanity: "Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead" (150th Anniversary Edition)

The compelling works presented in this volume were written at distinct periods in Dostoyevsky's life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer. From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying life to the anxious antihero of "Notes from Underground"—who both craves and despises affection—the writer's often-tormented characters showcase his evolving outlook on our fate.

Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as "an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul" and "Notes from Underground" as "an awe- and terror- inspiring example of this sympathy."

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

From the winner of the Forward Prize, "Augustown" is a magical and haunting novel set in the underbelly of Jamaica.
 
Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don’t, and plenty of things that shouldn’t happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better life.

Augustown

This stunning debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. With language as taut as classic works by Cormac McCarthy, and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison, Marlon James reveals his unique narrative command that will firmly establish his place as one of today's freshest, most talented young writers.

In the village of Gibbeah--where certain women fly and certain men protect secrets with their lives--magic coexists with religion, and good and evil are never as they seem. In this town, a battle is fought between two men of God. The story begins when a drunkard named Hector Bligh (the "Rum Preacher") is dragged from his pulpit by a man calling himself "Apostle" York. Handsome and brash, York demands a fire-and-brimstone church, but sets in motion a phenomenal and deadly struggle for the soul of Gibbeah itself. "John Crow's Devil" is a novel about religious mania, redemption, sexual obsession, and the eternal struggle inside all of us between the righteous and the wicked.


John Crow's Devil

Set in a yard which is a microcosm of Kingston slum life, this novel gives a picture of Jamaica and the dreadful conditions in which the working class live. This book precedes the Rasta story of Brother Man.

The Hills Were Joyful Together

Myal

In this captivating science fiction novel from an award-winning author, public gatherings are illegal making concerts impossible, except for those willing to break the law for the love of music, and for one chance at human connection.

In the Before, when the government didn't prohibit large public gatherings, Luce Cannon was on top of the world. One of her songs had just taken off and she was on her way to becoming a star. Now, in the After, terror attacks and deadly viruses have led the government to ban concerts, and Luce's connection to the world—her music, her purpose—is closed off forever. She does what she has to do: she performs in illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.

 Rosemary Laws barely remembers the Before times. She spends her days in Hoodspace, helping customers order all of their goods online for drone delivery—no physical contact with humans needed. By lucky chance, she finds a new job and a new calling: discover amazing musicians and bring their concerts to everyone via virtual reality. The only catch is that she'll have to do something she's never done before and go out in public. Find the illegal concerts and bring musicians into the limelight they deserve. But when she sees how the world could actually be, that won’t be enough.

A Song for a New Day

A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before.

Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. "Tacky’s Revolt" expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today.

Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

A firsthand account of the weird mysteries and horrors of voodoo. "Tell My Horse" is an invaluable resource and fascinating guide. Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experience in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies and customs and superstitions of great cultural interest.

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

The preeminent sociologist and National Book Award-winning author of "Freedom in the Making of Western Culture" grapples with the paradox of his homeland: its remarkable achievements amid continuing struggles since independence.

There are few places more puzzling than Jamaica. Jamaicans claim their home has more churches per square mile than any other country, yet it is one of the most murderous nations in the world. Its reggae superstars and celebrity sprinters outshine musicians and athletes in countries hundreds of times its size. Jamaica's economy is anemic and too many of its people impoverished, yet they are, according to international surveys, some of the happiest on earth. In "The Confounding Island, " Orlando Patterson returns to the place of his birth to reckon with its history and culture.

Patterson investigates the failures of Jamaica's postcolonial democracy, exploring why the country has been unable to achieve broad economic growth and why its free elections and stable government have been unable to address violence and poverty. He takes us inside the island's passion for cricket and the unparalleled international success of its local musical traditions. He offers a fresh answer to a question that has bedeviled sports fans: Why are Jamaican runners so fast?

Jamaica's successes and struggles expose something fundamental about the world we live in. If we look closely at the Jamaican example, we see the central dilemmas of globalization, economic development, poverty reduction, and postcolonial politics thrown into stark relief.

The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament

No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Lottery, Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann's mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.

It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

From a "New York Times" bestselling author, a gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder.

While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, resulting in a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain's appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished.

"Island on Fire" is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He memorably evokes the sights and sounds of the Caribbean in the 1830s, provides the first full portrait of its enigmatic leader Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.

Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

When Imelda Richardson leaves the small village of Watersgate, Jamaica, armed only with one small suitcase, she is doing so for the second time. One of the throng of young Jamaicans who left the island after the devastating hurricane of 1974, Imelda's journey has taken her to England, to the home of ganja-growing rebel Purletta Johnson, the arms of fake Northerner Ozzie, and a law degree. But when her mother dies Imelda returns to Watersgate, choosing Jamaica over England. 1983 is still a couple of years shy of the great dancehall explosion in which artists like Shabba Ranks would sing how he "loved punany bad," and the village is still dominated by the Evangelical church and the thundering voice of Pastor Braithwaite. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen—and in the absence of Perry Mason—she and Imelda decide to set up a Neighborhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite and the crusading zeal of Evangelist Millie. As a Pentecostal fervor sweeps through the village, the tensions between old and new come to a head.

The Same Earth

Notice to the
PUBLIC OF JAMAICA

Due to the threat of a rebellion by the slaves of this island, be it therefore enacted that from this day, 1st of July 1792, all persons report any suspicions of revolutionary plots immediately!

BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR

Presenting the fifth adventure from the spirited Cat Royal in which she joins a travelling theatre, turns pirate, undertakes a Caribbean Cruise, and gets mixed up in a slave revolt.

WITH A GUEST APPEARANCE FROM MR. BILLY SHEPHERD
(formerly of Covent Garden)

Prepare to swash your buckle in Cat's most outrageous adventure yet!

Black Heart of Jamaica (Cat Royal, #5)

Horizons is a series specifically written for Caribbean readers aged 11-14 years. The stories are selected both for their appeal to young people and for the quality of the writing.

Sprat Morrison (Horizons)

A beautifully wrought new novel about marriage and family from the acclaimed author of "
  Mr. Potter
  

"
In "See Now Then", the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters, a mother and father and their two children living in a small village in New England, as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future—for, as she writes, “the present will be a now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.”

Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. "See Now Then" is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.


Since the publication of her first short-story collection, "At the Bottom of the River", nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In "See Now Then", she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling—creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

See Now Then

"Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain-which is to say, all of it."

After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson - bestselling author of "The Mother Tongue" and "Made in America"-decided to return to the United States. ("I had recently read," Bryson writes, "that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.") But before departing, he set out on a grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.

Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, "Notes from a Small Island" is a delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation that has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey. The result is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile.

Notes from a Small Island

The classic work on the history and beliefs of the Rastafarians, whose roots of protest go back to the seventeenth-century maroon societies of escaped slaves in Jamaica. Based on an extensive study of the Rastafarians, their history, their ideology, and their influence in Jamaica, "The Rastafarians" is an important contribution to the sociology of religion and to our knowledge of the variety of religious expressions that have grown up during the West African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere.

The Rastafarians

New edition of a classic adventure novel and one of the most startling, highly praised stories in English literature - a brilliant chronicle of two sensitive children's violent voyage from innocence to experience.

After a terrible hurricane levels their Jamaican estate, the Bas-Thorntons decide to send their children back to the safety and comfort of England. On the way their ship is set upon by pirates, and the children are accidentally transferred to the pirate vessel. Jonsen, the well-meaning pirate captain, doesn't know how to dispose of his new cargo, while the children adjust with surprising ease to their new life. As this strange company drifts around the Caribbean, events turn more frightening and the pirates find themselves increasingly incriminated by the children's fates. The most shocking betrayal, however, will take place only after the return to civilization.

The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocative insight into the psychology of children, made it a best seller when it was first published in 1929 and has since established it as a classic of twentieth-century literature - an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.

A High Wind in Jamaica

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of her life: her impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, her escape to New York and her desire to become a writer, her faltering marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. In "My Name Is Lucy Barton, "one of America's finest writers shows how a simple hospital visit illuminates the most tender relationship of all-the one between mother and daughter.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood.

Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation system.

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World

Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid's novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood.

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, "It was in such a paradise that I lived." When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a "young lady," ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. "For I could not be sure," she reflects, "whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world."

Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid's inspired, lyrical short stories

Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision.

Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.

At the Bottom of the River

A Jamaican girl, Bita Plant, who was adopted and sent to be educated in England by white missionary benefactors, returns to her native village of Banana Bottom and finds her black heritage at war with her newly acquired culture.


Banana Bottom

D, a courier carrying cocaine from Jamaica to London, decides to go it alone and disappears into the mean streets of Hackney carrying a kilo of white powder that his erstwhile friends are anxious to recover. But D's treachery will never be forgotten - or forgiven.

Yardie

In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize—even to envy—a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that “constrict like throats,” every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

Jamaica

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James

The Book of Jamaica

Russell Banks

Tempting the Best Man (Gamble Brothers, #1)

J. Lynn

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood

Rachel Manley

Abeng

Michelle Cliff

The Book of Night Women

Marlon James

The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica

Ian Thomson

From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island

Lorna Goodison

Rule of the Bone

Russell Banks

A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid

Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home

Erna Brodber

The True History of Paradise

Margaret Cezair-Thompson

The Last Warner Woman

Kei Miller

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Augustown

Kei Miller

John Crow's Devil

Marlon James

The Hills Were Joyful Together

Roger Mais

Myal

Erna Brodber

A Song for a New Day

Sarah Pinsker

Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Vincent Brown

Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

Zora Neale Hurston

The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament

Orlando Patterson

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

Staceyann Chin

Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

Tom Zoellner

The Same Earth

Kei Miller

Black Heart of Jamaica (Cat Royal, #5)

Julia Golding

Sprat Morrison (Horizons)

Jean D'Costa

See Now Then

Jamaica Kincaid

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson

The Rastafarians

Leonard E. Barrett Sr.

A High Wind in Jamaica

Richard Hughes

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World

Trevor Burnard

Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid

At the Bottom of the River

Jamaica Kincaid

Banana Bottom

Claude McKay

Yardie

Victor Headley

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Kei Miller