This month’s Caribbean reading pick is a review by Shivanie Ramrochan of Mother Island, where her daughter claims Puerto Rico by Jamie Figueroa. Isolario/Islarium by Adalber Salas Hernández; Kipling Plus by Berkeley Wendell Semple. And followers: A story by AK Herman
Mother Island: Daughter claims Puerto Rico
By Jamie Figueroa (Pantheon, 272 pp, ISBN 9780553387681)
What happens to the daughter behind the scenes at the border set around the periphery of her own mother’s story? This journey is the subject of revelation, barb wired and responsive Mother Islandit makes an uncertain and fierce ship from Figueroa as she reaches the language, history and patriarch. Through this absorbent prose, the memoir’s satisfying claim to portray oneself in a whimsical, honest tone with the clarity of a crazy Bell. The meandering, embarrassing relationship with Spanish reveals the author’s restlessness and palpable hunger for more of her Taino ancestors. “Everyone knows someone like me,” Figueroa tells us in confession mode. Those who navigate the tightrope of being will find themselves spotted here with loving candidness.
Isolario/islarium
Adalber Salas Hernández (Peepal Tree Press, 118 pp, ISBN 9781845235857)
In this fascinating bilingual collection, Venezuelan poet Adalvar Salas Hernandez reveals, “The island is the most unattainable and almost inhuman place of longing.” The body-insatiable sense of pursuit in these poems was translated into English by Robin Myers. They plague the atmosphere of moving into the territory of known, unknown islands, forcing speakers to witness. It’s not a geography mistake, the poet suggests that the islands, like so many rebellious, fragmentary teeth, lack themselves from land that looms over time. From Tenerife to Tulle, the islands blessed by the Nimrod Islands; Isolario/islarium Presenting us with astrolabes and sextents, we will introduce us to boldly introduce us to be found in either patches of grass or concrete surrounding grass or concrete. As deep and relentlessly strange as you can imagine, these poems match your energy.
Kipling Plus
Berkeley Wendell Semple (Peepal Tree Press, 334 pp, ISBN 9781845235925)
When you leave the place for 40 years, don’t expect it to stand still for your return. Kipling Plays, the eponymous protagonist of Semple’s debut novel, returns to Mahaicony in Guyana, where the flashbacks of his indicted youth in this place, immersed in the excesses of libidinism, holiganism and political urgency, simultaneously leaving them, changing forever. Sepia of nostalgia avoids the swaying portrait, Kipling Plus It’s a scatology runaway of over 300 pages and doesn’t waste a single word. What pockets does Semple rest in the race-related hotbed, regardless of the pockets of Guyana in the 1970s and 80s? A conspiracy of disconnection in high and low offices. The wilderness of that Empuréan exceeds the risk of being sorted or tamed. Well-named and then abandoned, Kipling is less appealing than he continues to live like a tattered, tenacious, melancholy Lyanna.
Believers: Stories
By AK Herman (AR Phillips Press, 212 pp, ISBN 9781948788014)
He was selected as the 2025 OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature. Believers It’s a collective anxiety – an invitation to free yourself from the stories you think you know. Hermann’s debut collection of short stories calls a determined washing machine with rebellion encoded in thorns. An inhuman winged boy whose horns glitter and his flight promises calculations. The confident assistant professor portrays the protests in velvet in the protocol. These are unwavering players and powerful even in acts of annoyance and sinking, written with incredible immediacy. “In Bacollet, the river muttered, and the mountain said it on the way down,” says the survivor who wonders what the river is saying about her. Herman’s character is realistic enough to touch, fight and love.
