I know I say this every year but 2024 will be amazing year for persons who Read Caribbean. Some amazing debut Caribbean Authors will be hitting the shelves in 2024 and I am here to let you know about all of them!
We will be reading novels, books from authors we haven’t read in a while. I am really excited to hear more from debut Caribbean authors as they add their perspective and writing to an already establish diverse cannon. While I love a great debut novel, I am super excited for the works of our favorite authors. Yes! 2024 is gonna be an amazing year for Caribbean Literature and you won’t want to miss out! Here are a few books to look forward to.
JANAURY
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake.
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby’s high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that’s exactly what they get.
Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe
Award-winning historian, professor, and journalist Tao Leigh Goffe launches an investigation of the Caribbean as the seat of corrupt Western wealth and environmental exploitation.
In Dark Laboratory, Goffe embarks on a historical journey into the influences that have made these islands—from Jamaica and Aruba to Cuba and Martinique—a target of Western capitalism and the foundation of the global economy as we know it today. Through the lens of personal and family memoir, as well as cultural and social history, Goffe seeks to radically transform how we conceive of Blackness, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Her writing considers the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude as Chinese laborers worked alongside enslaved Black people to excavate products like sugarcane and guano—in its day more valuable than gold—from these island nations.
FEBRUARY
A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay
Starring an unforgettably fierce 99-year-old Jamaican heroine, A House for Miss Pauline is a transporting and tender story with a mystery at its heart that asks profound and urgent questions about who owns the land on which our identities are forged. For readers of Nicole Dennis-Benn, James McBride, and other stories about colonialism and personal history.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
Causalities of the Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma
From the author of Book of the Little Axe, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, DC, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Prudence Wright seems to have it a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, DC; and the past glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to dedicate her days to her autistic son Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis’s new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course.
With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.
Ibis by Justin Haynes
A bold, witty, magical new voice in fiction, Justin Haynes weaves a cross-generational Caribbean story of migration, superstition, and a search for family in the novel Ibis.
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions. New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
MARCH
The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams by Jason Allen-Paisant
The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.
Girl Within A Girl by Nanda Reddy
A girl takes on a series of identities to survive, shrouding herself in layer upon layer of secrets, until one morning years later when she is forced to reckon with her past.
On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating Who is Sunny? Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana—a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.
Steeped in sensory detail, this striking debut transports the reader from the sugar cane fields of Guyana to the world of immigrant laborers in Miami to the affluent suburbs of Atlanta. Nanda Reddy takes us on a wrenching journey of assimilation, survival, and reinvention that explores the very construct of identity—all the while underscoring the strength of chosen family, love, and the resilience of the human spirit.
APRIL
The Book of Possibilities: Words of Wisdom on the Road to Becoming by Bee Quammie
Bee Quammie invites women and girls everywhere to embrace the power of possibility in this intimate, powerful, and inspiring collection.
A successful Black woman in media, Bee Quammie often finds herself being cast as a role model for young women—and especially women of colour. But Bee has never quite been comfortable with the idea of being a role model for the next generation. Who is she to suggest anyone live the way she has? Follow a certain path? Who says the path she followed is the “right” one—that there even is a “right” one?
JUNE
How to Unmothered by Camille Adams
Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity’s first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet’s homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Camille U. Adams weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.
As a young girl, Adams finds solace in Trinidad’s whispering fever grass, sweet ixora flowers, and the cradling branches of the rose mango tree—all of their roots connecting her to the land’s long memory. But where flora gives way to the rank pavement of Covigne Road, gunshots echo and men amass in the doorways of derelict garages, their mouths and hands promising violation. Home offers no just an explosive father, cowed sisters, and a mother whose only reprieve is control. Cloying, suffocating, the maternal embrace threatens to blot out all else. Is it better to be choked, or not to be held at all?
Tormented by her mother’s presence and haunted by her absence, Camille U. Adams’ dazzling debut is a breathtaking account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after.
JULY
Love Forms by Claire Adam
A heart-stirring novel about a mother’s love, in all its forms, as a woman searches for the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager growing up in the Caribbean, from the prize-winning author of Golden Child
For much of her life, Dawn has felt as if something had been missing. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, with a divorce behind her and her two grown-up sons busy with their own lives, she should be trying to settle into a new future for herself. But she keeps returning to the past and to the secret she’s kept all these years. At just sixteen, Dawn found herself pregnant, and—as was common in Trinidad back then—her parents sent her away to have the baby and give her up for adoption.
More than forty years later, Dawn yearns to reconnect with her lost daughter. But tracking down her child is not as easy as she had thought. It’s an emotional journey that leads Dawn to retrace her steps back home and to question not only that fateful decision she’d made as a teenager but every turn in the road of her life since.
Love Forms is a powerfully moving story of a woman in search of herself—a novel that rings with heartfelt empathy through the passages of a mother’s life, depicting the enduring bonds of love, family, and home.
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life.
Clara, a celebrity author in desperate need of validation, believes Serene is their mother, while Dempsey, isolated and content to remain so, believes she is a con woman. As they clash over this stranger, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts–together. In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that Black women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”
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