The New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival celebrates books and writers from around the world and reflects the languages spoken in our communities. Discover what our patrons are reading in different languages, resources the Library offers, free online events, book recommendations, and more.

This blog post was written in collaboration with Hyacinth Persad, Senior Librarian, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, and Lucile Francois, Library Manager, Macomb's  Bridge Library.

Can you name the countries where some of the leading English-speaking Caribbean authors are from? In this cross-section of literature, we highlight prize-winning debut novels and new nonfiction books, which we hope will engage and inform you. These recommendations are available from the Library in both print and electronic formats. You can also access The New York Public Library Digital Collections, and Articles & Databases with your library card during our current grab and go phase. 

 

Biography & Memoir

Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya by Jamaica Kincaid

In this travel memoir, the acclaimed novelist Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a three-week trek through Nepal, the spectacular and exotic Himalayan land, where she and her companions are gathering seeds for planting at home.

C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary by Paul Buhle

This biography of 20th-century Trinidadian scholar, novelist, Pan Africanist, and Marxist intellectual C. L. R. James approaches his life as a window into 20th-century cultural, intellectual, and political developments in the Caribbean, Europe, and the U.S.

Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie”—the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman—shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize—her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her.

Derek Walcott by Edward Baugh

This succinct account of the life of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott focuses on his development as poet, playwright and man of the theatre: director, producer, teacher.

Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart Hall

With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain.

Just As I Am: A Memoir by Cicely Tyson

The Academy, Tony, and Emmy Award-winning actor and trailblazer tells her stunning story, looking back at her life and six-decade career.

So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens

Draws on forty years of intimate interviews with band members, family, lovers, and confidants, many speaking publicly for the first time, to offer an oral history depicting the reggae icon's life.

Fiction

Barbados

How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie S. A. Jones

An intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town, told by an astonishing new author of literary fiction.

Unraveling by Karen Lord

In this standalone fantasy novel, the dark truth behind a string of unusual murders leads to an otherworldly exploration of spirits, myth, and memory, steeped in Caribbean storytelling.

Haiti

Everything Inside: Stories by Edwidge Danticat

A single-volume collection of short stories by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Brother, I’m Dying is set in such locales as Miami, Port-au-Prince and the Caribbean and poignantly explores the forces that unite and divide.

Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse

After the 2010 Haiti earthquake kills her parents, a woman returns to Haiti after leaving it as a child, 25 years ago.

Ireland/Trinidad

Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo

With grace and dexterity, Polar Vortex maps the interiority of middle age lesbians and the complex and fraught intimate dances of couples.

Jamaica

Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Internal culture clashes are at the center of the twelve intersecting parts that make up Frying Plantain, in which a girl grows from a timid, eager-to-belong child into a confident young adult and discovers what it means to break away from the crowd and to hold what's important close.

Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Receiving her long-coveted visa to America, Patsy leaves behind her family in Jamaica only to discover that life as an undocumented immigrant is not what her best friend had described.

These Ghosts are Family by Maisy Card

A man on his deathbed reveals that he stole another man’s identity decades earlier, traces the family’s history from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem and reconnects with the firstborn daughter he never knew.

Jamaica/Barbados

River Called Time by Courttia Newland

A monumental speculative fiction story of love, loyalty, politics, and conscience, set in parallel Londons.

Republic of Trinidad & Tobago

Brother by David Chariandy

Coming of age during a sweltering summer in their Toronto housing complex, two boys, the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, dare to imagine better lives in the face of a violent shooting and the pulsing beats of 1990s hip-hop culture.

Golden Child by Claire Adam

A powerful debut . . . a devastating family portrait, and a fascinating window into Trinidadian society.

Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

In vibrant, addictive Trinidadian prose, Love After Love questions who and how we love, the obligations of family, and the consequences of choices made in desperation.

U.S. Virgin Islands

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world.​

History (Nonfiction)

Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna by Christopher Taylor

In The Black Carib Wars, Christopher Taylor offers the most thoroughly researched history of the struggle of the Garifuna people to preserve their freedom on the island of St. Vincent.

Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide by Hilary Beckles

Weaving detailed historical data on Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade together with legal principles and the politics of postcolonialism, Beckles sets out a solid academic analysis of the evidence. 

Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Eustace Williams

 In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean.

Literature (History and Criticism)

Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel

The first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature bridges the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies and enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization.

 

Immigration and Caribbean Literature by Malachi McIntosh

Emigration and Caribbean Literature is a fresh and necessary re-engagement with the generation of writers from the Caribbean Basin who journeyed to Europe to establish their names and literary reputations between and after the two World Wars.

 

Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being by Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover examines Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature whose female protagonists enact practices of freedom that privilege the self, challenge the prioritization of the community over the individual, and refuse masculinist discourses of postcolonial nation building.

Nonfiction

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean by James A. Delle and Elizabeth C. Clay

While previous research on household archaeology in the colonial Caribbean has drawn heavily on artifact analysis, this volume provides the first in-depth examination of the architecture of slave housing during this period. 

Beyond Homophobia: Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean by Moji Anderson and Erin C. MacLeod

By illuminating the lives, experiences, and research of and about the queer Anglophone Caribbean, this volume represents a concerted attempt to move Beyond Homophobia.

Carnival Is Woman: Feminism and Performance in Caribbean Mas by Frances Henry and Dwaine Plaza

Women are performing an ever-growing role in Caribbean Carnival. Through a feminist perspective, this volume examines the presence of women in contemporary Carnival.

Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean by Lyndon K. Gill

This trans-disciplinary book foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.

High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture by Kevin Adonis Browne

High Mas explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, Browne delves into Mas as an emancipatory practice. 

Jump Up!: Caribbean Carnival Music in New York by Ray Allen

The first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study.

Kebra Nagast: The Lost Bible of Rastafarian Wisdom and Faith by Gerald Hausman

A sacred text to Ethiopian Christians and Jamaican Rastafarians, The Kebra Nagast tells of the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and their son Menyelik, who hid the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. 

Provisions: The Roots of Caribbean Cooking –150 Vegetarian Recipes by Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau

In Provisions, sisters Michelle and Suzanne Rousseau share 130 recipes that pay homage to the meals and market produce that have been farmed, sold, and prepared by Caribbean people—particularly Caribbean women—for centuries.

Poetry

Crossfire: A Litany for Survival by Staceyann Chin

Powerhouse, world-renowned LGBTQ poet and spoken-word artist Staceyann Chin curates the first full-length collection of her poems.

Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution by David Austin

Dread Poetry and Freedom explores Johnson’s work through the radical political and poetic traditions he engaged, reflecting poetry’s potential to bring about social transformation.

Hurricane Protocol by Lasana M. Sekou

There is a raw urgency to these poems within the 'protocol' set, the 'name' of each echoes marine distress-calling, a plea to humanity; recounting the travails during the super-storms Irma and Maria...the unprecedented level of destruction that the storms wrought on the poet's home island of St. Martin, and on neighboring Caribbean countries and territories.

 

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Have trouble reading standard print? Many of these titles are available in formats for patrons with print disabilities.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.