Great fiction from the Caribbean
Discover the best Caribbean fiction books! Explore captivating stories, vibrant cultures, and unforgettable characters from top authors across the Caribbean islands.
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A House for Mr. Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul
From the Nobel Prize-winning author: an unforgettable comedy of manners inspired by the author's father that has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels. “A marvelous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.” —Newsweek In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning death of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family on whom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on an arduous—and endless—struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark yet comedic novel, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
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Texaco
by Patrick Chamoiseau
"Chamoiseau is a writer who has the sophistication of the modern novelist, and it is from that position (as an heir of Joyce and Kafka) that he holds out his hand to the oral prehistory of literature." --Milan Kundera Of black Martinican provenance, Patrick Chamoiseau gives us Texaco (winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize), an international literary achievement, tracing one hundred and fifty years of post-slavery Caribbean history: a novel that is as much about self-affirmation engendered by memory as it is about a quest for the adequacy of its own form. In a narrative composed of short sequences, each recounting episodes or developments of moment, and interspersed with extracts from fictive notebooks and from statements by an urban planner, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the saucy, aging daughter of a slave affranchised by his master, tells the story of the tormented foundation of her people's identity. The shantytown established by Marie-Sophie is menaced from without by hostile landowners and from within by the volatility of its own provisional state. Hers is a brilliant polyphonic rendering of individual stories informed by rhythmic orality and subversive humor that shape a collective experience. A joyous affirmation of literature that brings to mind Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Joyce, Texaco is a work of rare power and ambition, a masterpiece.
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The House on the Lagoon
by Rosario Ferré
Caught up in his wife's efforts to write a novel about the history of their families, Quintin Mendizabal sparks a heated rivalry between Isabel and himself when they have different perspectives on the same story
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A Small Place
by Jamaica Kincaid
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, this memoir is a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua, by the author of "Annie John."
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"
