This June, Afro•Reads & C. Elyseare island hopping — one book at a time. From Jamaica to Barbados, and everything in between we’re exploring stories of resistance, migration, identity, and joy.
Both of us decided that while the world seems to be going to hell and being a bookworm is becoming expensive; we’re going to continue buying books for ourselves and our family members.
Also, don’t forget we are celebrating Juneteenth by Reading & Discussing Jazz by Toni Morrison via Zoom.
Join us for Caribbean Reads Month as we celebrate the authors who have shaped world literature.” 📚🌴🌊
Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she's covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home.
The Dragon Can’t Dance
Earl Lovelace 1979 novel is set in the shantytown of Calvary Hill, Port of Spain, during the 1960s. It follows Aldrick Prospect, who embodies the "dragon" during Carnival, a dance that expresses the community's frustrations and power, but becomes entangled in a futile rebellion against the commercialization and social changes affecting his neighborhood, leading to jail time and a loss of his dancing identity.
Twenty years ago, Nadine was persuaded to walk away from the love of her life. Now, a chance encounter gives her one shot to reclaim a future she thought was lost forever.
A novel about two Jamaican sisters, Jenny and Hortense Rodney, who grow up in rural Jamaica and later move to Brixton, London, as part of the Windrush generation
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what the younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins’ fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated.
Marlon James has a new book coming out this fall, The Disappears, preorder here.
Augustown
A magical and haunting novel set in the backlands of Jamaica, exploring themes of history, race, class, violence, and myth through the interconnected stories of its residents, particularly focusing on the blind elder Ma Taffy and her great-nephew Kaia. The narrative weaves together folklore, Rastafarian history, and the harsh realities of Jamaican life, using poetic and inventive prose to examine collective memory and the struggle for a better future.
A House for Miss Pauline
“This is Afro Reads personal review, I listened to the audiobook on Spotify earlier this year and I haven’t been the same since. Pauline is about to turn 100 years old and wants to right her wrongs. Her house is talking to her, the stones they are made from. She built it from the remains of an old plantation.
But she needs help. Her children are dead and she only knows one granddaugher, she sends for her from foreign so she can help her with this last deed. She befriends a young man who also needs help and together they set on righting wrongs, but its more than what she has bargained for.”
I think the reader will benefit from the audiobook better because the narrator has a Jamaican patois accent to make you feel at home and honestly, you’re going to be so wrapped in if you listen while cooking, you may burn your dinner!
Annie John is a coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, set in Antigua, that chronicles the protagonist Annie's journey from a blissful childhood to adolescence, focusing on her complex and shifting relationship with her mother, the loss of innocence, and her struggle for independence
St. Lucia 🇱🇨
Omeros is an epic poem by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott that reimagines Homeric myths in the post-colonial Caribbean, particularly on his native St. Lucia, weaving together the lives of fishermen like Hector and Achille, a taxi driver named Helen, and the poet himself, exploring themes of history, identity, colonialism, and the search for origins through a blend of classical allusion and local narrative
Grenada 🇬🇩
This is a debut collection of linked short stories by Black British author Shani Akilah, published in June 2024, that explores the lives of young Black Londoners navigating relationships, community, and challenges like workplace racism and mental health during the pandemic.
*The author has roots throughout the Caribbean through both sides of her family with Grenada included.
Guyana 🇬🇾
Walter Rodney’s classic 1972 texts argues that European imperialism deliberately drained the continent of its wealth. Through the slave trade and colonialism, Europe systematically underdeveloped Africa—stagnating its growth while simultaneously using African resources and labor to fuel Europe's own industrial and capitalist rise.
*I’m struggling with this book, its very dense and I haven’t made it through the first section — can anyone aid me me in this endeavor.
A debut a multi-generational saga set in Barbados that follows one family through decades as they grapple with secrets, trauma, and identity, loosely inspired by Greek mythology. The story centers on four main characters—Iapetus, Atlas, Calypso, and Nautilus—exploring how a hidden, tragic past haunts each generation as they try to escape or understand their legacy.
Smallie
Another debut novel about a Bajan family in Britain, centered on a grandmother threatened with deportation due to the Windrush scandal, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and generational trauma through a story that moves between the 1960s and the present day. The book follows 75-year-old Lucinda as her children fight to prove her legal right to remain in the UK, a struggle that unearths her past choices and the injustices faced by the Windrush generation.
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her House
In Baxter's Beach, Barbados, Lala's grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It's a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter's Tunnels. When she's grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven into the Tunnels by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom - and their lives.
The Castle in my Skin
Personally reminds me of Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter. This is an 1953 autobiographical novel about a young boy's coming-of-age in a Barbadian village during the 1930s, exploring themes of colonialism, identity, and social change through the protagonist G.'s awakening to the injustices of his world, including the decline of the English landlord's power and the rise of a new, more complex society. The story details G.'s childhood experiences, his education, and his growing awareness of the racial and economic tensions shaping his community, contrasting the idyllic village life with the harsh realities of colonial rule and the promise of emigration to England.
Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed.
Edwidge Dandicat has a new book, Dèy, coming out late summer, preorder here.
Originally published in 1968, Love, Anger, Madness virtually disappeared from circulation until its republication in France in 2005. Set in the barely fictionalized Haiti of "Papa Doc" Duvalier's repressive rule, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's writing was so powerful and so incendiary that she was forced to flee to the United States. Yet Love, Anger, Madness endures.
Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…
In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash. Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered. And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.
I love, love, LOVE Elizabeth Acevedo down! She has a new book coming out this fall, Anger is Only a Shadow, preorder here
Discovered by Martha Divine in the backstreets of San Juan, picking over garbage, drugged out of his mind and singing boleros that transfix the listener, a fifteen year old hustler is transformed into Sirena Selena, a diva whose uncanny beauty and irrisistable voice will be their ticket to fame and fortune. Auditioning for one of the luxury hotels in the Dominican Republic, Selena casts her spell over Hugo Graubel, one of the hotel's rich investors. Graubel is a powerful man in the Republic, married with children.
It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas--the Butterflies.
Caribbean authors come from a multicultural tradition, and this wide-ranging anthology collects 52 stories representing more than a century's worth of 'pan-american' short fiction. Although the various authors explore similar themes of history, race, social justice, identity and migration, they do so in diverse ways."--The Orlando Sentinel
I hope everyone enjoyed this collection of books.
Please don’t be a square, let us know in the comments what books you have read, your favorite author, and list a few books we may have missed!
Thank you for this! As far as the Walter Rodney book being dense, have you ever tried immersive reading? This is reading the physical book while listening to the audiobook at the same time and following along. I find that this helps me when I’m having a hard time getting through a book, especially if I’m annotating.
I highly recommend Ayiti by Roxanne Gay- a collection of short stories centered on the Haitian diaspora.
Thank you for this! As far as the Walter Rodney book being dense, have you ever tried immersive reading? This is reading the physical book while listening to the audiobook at the same time and following along. I find that this helps me when I’m having a hard time getting through a book, especially if I’m annotating.