This month’s recommended reading from the Caribbean. Includes a book review by Shivani Ramlochan of The Lost Love Songs of Boyji Singh by Ingrid Persaud. “Let Me Liberate You” by Andy Davis. The Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Howd. School of Instruction by Ision Hutchinson
Boyjee Singh’s Lost Love Song
Written by Ingrid Persaud (Faber & Faber, 544 pages, ISBN 9780571386499)
If a gangster is just as good as his fellow gunslingers, what happens to the leading women who exist within, inform, and shape him? This is the deep and provocative question that Trinidad and Tobago-born Ingrid Persaud attempts to answer in her second novel. Boyjee Singh’s Lost Love Song. Based on the real-life charismatic career criminals who terrorized Trinidad from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, Persaud focuses on four women whose fates become dangerously and dramatically intertwined with Boysie’s. Jealousy, intrigue, and no small amount of idiocy inform the dynamic shared by this lively quartet of Popo, Mana Lala, Doris, and Rosie. They love him, they hate him, they hate to love him – in the author’s crackling, vibrant use of Trinidad English Creole, this obsession and anger and numbers More than just a bullet, the story hurtles toward its violent conclusion.
let me release you
Written by Andy Davis (Little A, 268 pages, ISBN 9781662515644)
What happens when your homeland, the island you fled to after an identity crisis, turns out to be as fraught with politics as complex as the diaspora you fled? In Montserrat-born Andy Davis’ debut novel,… The main character, Saber Cumberbatch, listens to the voices of Barbados and despairs of the overseas capitalist art scene, which has achieved fame but lacks genuine recognition. Saber soon learned that Barbados is not a complex monolith. The class disparities she encountered sparked an island-wide campaign for social justice. The novel’s dry tone quickly drew comparisons to Mackenzie’s novels in terms of storytelling. ugly year and mac ivers God of beauty, At the same time, it reveals the socio-cultural realities of Barbados embedded in its very limestone land. Saber’s flaws and shortcomings feel very human, and readers will root for her as she attempts to find a true connection to a place so beautiful that it is difficult to simplify.
bad seed
Written by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Howd (Feminist Press, 120 pages, ISBN 9781558613201)
“I’m not interested in therapy because I tested positive when I was 20 and already know I’ll never find love. It’s the only reason I want to keep going.” A non-heteronormative Puerto Rican young man immerses himself in Gabriel Carle’s short stories with growing anxiety. bad seed I’m not interested in reader reviews. Hated and vilified by those who claim to care for them, they roam, sprawl, and frolic as merrily as possible in bathhouses, restroom kiosks, and shopping mall parking lots. Translated from Spanish, these are imploding fictions. The story raises its fist against gentrification and queer hatred. In “Devil Work,” pornography intersects and collides with unspeakable loneliness. The protagonist of “Helium” sees love rise and fall, expanding and collapsing to the rhythm of Valentine’s Day celebrations in a fractured family life.
Guidance school
Written by Ision Hutchinson (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 112 pages, ISBN 9780374610272)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, this book of poems interweaves the youth of a boy in rural Jamaica in the 1990s through his experiences with the British West Indies Regiment in World War I. It guides the reader through a non-linear timeline. 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist, Guidance school Hutchinson’s readers have come to expect and covet his work. An entire ocean of Jamaican youth, history and survival swells in the rebellious tongue of Godspeed. In the trenches of regiments, mud earns millions of state deprivations and banal brutality. “Look for me in the whirlwind!” cries Godspeed, fleeing from his oppressor. He exposes himself to a multisensory survival that every part of his being endures, despite systematic provocations, despite harm from colonial supervillains.
