My Favorite Caribbean Collection
Discover the best Caribbean books with our favorite collection! Explore must-read novels, travel guides, and cultural stories from the Caribbean islands.
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AzĂşcar!
by Alan Cambeira
AZUCAR! The Story of Sugar is a fictional novel that offers a gripping testimony to the unmasked brutality and decay of daily life on a contemporary Caribbean sugarcane plantation, Esperanza Dulce. Azucar, the intelligent and beautiful young girl, is the central character, but the omnipresent protagonist is her namesake, "azucar" -- sugar itself. Azucar?s story is a complex and hauntingly atmospheric tale of sustained intrigue, murder, revenge, forbidden love, and an unnerving journey into the mystical spirit world of Caribbean ritual. Even after Azucar?s fiercely determined grandmother arranges for her to emigrate to Canada -- with a most unlikely couple-- where she is dramatically transformed, she is still not completely free from the hypnotic pull of the distant Caribbean plantation. Azucar meets and falls in love with Lucien, whose own mysterious history shockingly brings them both back to Esperanza Dulce to confront the terrifying ghosts of an unknowingly shared past.
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.
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Drown
by Junot DĂaz
From the beloved and award-winning author Junot DĂaz, a spellbinding saga of a family’s journey through the New World. A coming-of-age story of unparalleled power, Drown introduced the world to Junot DĂaz's exhilarating talents. It also introduced an unforgettable narrator— Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his family’s precarious journey from the barrios of Santo Domingo to the tenements of industrial New Jersey, and their epic passage from hope to loss to something like love. Here is the soulful, unsparing book that made DĂaz a literary sensation.
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Geographies of Home
by Loida Maritza Perez
After leaving the college she'd attended to escape her religiously conservative parents, Iliana, a first-generation Dominican-American woman, returns home to Brooklyn to find that her family is falling apart: one sister is careening toward mental collapse, another sister is living in a decrepit building with her abusive husband and three children, and a third sister has simply disappeared. In this dislocating urban environment Iliana reluctantly confronts the anger and desperation that seem to seep through every crack of her family's small house, and experiences all the contradictions, superstitions, joys, and pains that come from a life caught between two cultures. In this magnificent debut novel, filled with graceful prose and searing detail, Loida Maritza PĂ©rez offers a penetrating portrait of the American immigrant experience as she explores the true meanings of identity, family--and home.
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The Farming of Bones
by Edwidge Danticat
Memorializing the forgotten victims of ethnic cleansing in Haiti in the 1930s, this novel revolves around a Haitian-born servant girl and her lover, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, as they struggle against the violence.
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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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When I was Puerto Rican
by Esmeralda Santiago
Selling over 16,000 copies in hardcover, this triumphant coming-of-age memoir is now available in paperback editions in both English and Spanish. In the tradition of Black Ice, Santiago writes lyrically of her childhood on her native island and of her bewildering years of transition in New York City.
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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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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"
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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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