My Top 15 Caribbean Novels
Discover the best Caribbean novels with our top 15 must-read picks! Explore vibrant stories, rich cultures, and unforgettable characters from the Caribbean's finest authors.
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AzĂșcar!
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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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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Drown
by Junot DĂaz
From the beloved and award-winning author Junot DĂaz, a spellbinding saga of a familyâs 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 narratorâ Yunior, the haunted, brilliant young man who tracks his familyâs 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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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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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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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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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 Feast of the Goat
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.