BookOfCinz Book Club is going into its seventh year in 2025. For the last six years we have been meeting in person in Trinidad and Tobago and online so we can have people from all over the world joining. In 2023 we started reading Caribbean and African male authors. We do continue to read and celebrate Women- Caribbean Women, Women of Caribbean heritage, Black Women and Women of Colour.
In 2018 I decided to start BookOfCinz Book Club to meet and engage with Readers. I read a lot, but getting to sit and discuss one book with a group of persons, that experience in and of itself is unmatched. For the last five years we have been meeting both offline and online to facilitate everyone outside of Trinidad and Tobago. Since the start of the Book Club, we have seen over 1,000 unique Book Clubbers. We have had Book Clubbers from all over the Caribbean, the US, UK, Europe, Africa and as far as India.
For 2025 we will continue to meet and read books that moves us, that gets under our skins and stay there, books we cannot shut up about. I do hope you make the time to Read, read More, read Widely and READ CARIBBEAN in 2025. Come join book club and read with us!
If you missed the previous book clubs, here’s what we read in 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019. You can purchase the book club pick in Trinidad at Uppercrust, in the UK or the US or use my Amazon list. Want to join the book club? Go here to sign up!
Come and read and find your community with us in 2025! Join the community here!
January | BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN by MARLON JAMES
The Book of Night Women is set on plantation in Jamaica back in the 18th century. It follows the lives of the plantation owners and the some Night Women as they plan a slavery revolt. We meet Lilith who was born on the plantation, her mother and father remains unknown for most of the book, however, her history is steeped in Plantation culture. James does an amazing job of exploring plantation life.
February | GHOSTROOST by ‘Pemi
Set mostly in Lagos, Ghostroots is collection of 12 stories that explores very haunting topics in fresh and unsettling ways. I loved the story that started the collection- Manifest is about a girl who starts spiraling and her mother keeps mistaking her for her grandmother who is evil incarnate. Brilliant and unsettling, I still get goosebumps thinking about it. In Breastmilk we are taken into a family that is falling apart but they just had a baby so they must put things aside. There’s the story of young boys who keep disappearing in a community and they can’t seem to figure why they are dying.
March | SWEETNESS IN THE SKIN by Ishi Robinson
For fans of The Girl With the Louding Voice or Dew Angels, a coming of age that will leave you cheering to the end. In Sweetness in the Skin we meet thirteen year old Pumpkin Patterson who lives in a tiny home in the ghetto with her Grandmother, Mother and Aunty. Her Grandmother is a dressmaker whose main goal is to get them as far away from the ghetto as possible. Her Aunty Sophie works at the French embassy and takes very good care of her, they made a pack to leave for France as soon as Pumpkin passes her French exams. Pumpkin’s mother Paulette is hardly home, she is seen as the Black Sheep of the family, darker than Aunty Sophie and lives in her shadow. It is clear the grandmother treats each daughter differently and that’s been a sore point in their relationships. Themese of idenity, love, regret and mother-daughter relationships.
