Caribbean Writers You Need to Read This Summer

Set in the 1940s, on the cusp of American occupation and the end of British colonialism, this epic novel explores the treatment of Trinidad’s Hindu population. The Saroop family lives in the barrack—a leaking, dilapidated wood and tin building separated into units for multiple families. Shweta Saroop, desperate to move her family to a more respectable subdivision and improve prospects for her son, agrees to her husband, Hans, temporarily moving to the Changoor farm to serve as watchman after the wealthy owner goes missing. But Hans falls for Marlee Changoor and the comforts of estate living, upending his family and the barrack in unexpected ways, leading him—and the reader—to question what he has sacrificed to gain the so-called “good life.”

A Jamaican family’s migration to Miami in the 1970s sets the stage for this impressive debut collection of linked stories that was longlisted for the National Book Award. Trelawny, the main character appearing in most of the stories, has recently graduated from college in the Midwest. It is 2008, the economy has faltered, and Trelawny’s college degree doesn’t open the doors he expects. Back in Miami, Trelawny attempts to find worthwhile employment, taking on a range of increasingly questionable gigs while navigating homelessness and his now fractured family. Racial identity—both Trelawny’s concept of what it means to be a Black man of mixed heritage in America and the notions of race and identity put upon him by others—plays a role in most every gig Trelawny takes on. A powerful commentary about the struggle to belong.

“We remember,” Yejide’s grandmother says as she ends a story about a time before time. Growing up, Yejide believes her family holds the memory of their people’s origins and understands that she is the woman in her generation chosen to shepherd the dead into the afterlife. Rather than mourn her mother and assume her role, she takes up with Darwin, a young Rastafarian man. While Yejide can only dream of avoiding her legacy, Darwin has succeeded in shedding his. He cuts off his locks and goes against his Rastafarian teachings, finding work as a gravedigger in the old Fidelis graveyard, where Yejide’s ancestors are also. Part love story, part ghost story, part murder mystery, this imaginative novel is a satisfying merging of the past and the present.

Migration is an integral part of most every Caribbean family’s story, and this collection of short stories—a finalist for The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction—explores the lives of Jamaican women who have created homes far from their home known as “the Island.” In stories set in Panama, London, and various American cities, the immigrants and descendants of immigrants we meet are seeking ways to settle into their adopted lands, revealing the resulting disconnection that comes from assimilation, best described by Anaya’s observation in “All-Inclusive”: “She wasn’t Jamaican, but at the same time, she was. Because she was born in Canada, Kraft Dinner, hockey night, and soggy boxes of poutine were as much home as the crispy skin of escovitch fish ladled with vinegar, steel-pan drums, and cornmeal porridge. They all felt like home, tasted like home, but were not home. She was a tourist, too.”

Jamaican and Trinidadian folklore—with origins in West Africa—takes the stage in this debut novel, infusing the Porter family’s Brooklyn home with mysticism and ghost stories. Two Brooklyn-born sisters are witnesses to their father’s alcohol-infused violence, their mother’s physical deterioration, and the fracturing of their family unit. As the family falls apart, Zora, who dreams of becoming a writer, journals to escape; Sasha physically flees to her girlfriend’s home. The folktales, interspersed throughout the novel, are both the bridge that connects the daughters and their parents, and the medium that reveals the truth about a family member’s death. Like the West African folktales upon which the family relies, the novel highlights the power of story and myth to engage, teach, and soothe—and the enduring power of West African folklore in the diaspora.