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Abeng

Michelle Cliff · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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In the Castle of My Skin

George Lamming · 313 pages

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz · 352 pages

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us

CaribbeanCultural IdentityColonialismComing of Age
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

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Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid · 148 pages

Since her first, prize-winning collection of stories, *At the Bottom of the River*, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. *The New York Times* hailed her "prophetic power" and the *Los Angeles Times Book Review* said: "No one else seems to be writing quite this way right now." With *Annie John*, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open th

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Small Island

Andrea Levy · 448 pages

The story of Small Island revolves around four characters, Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie and Bernard. They are two couples, one white Queenie and Bernard and one Black, Hortense and Gilbert. The novel is narrated in the perspective of these four characters. Plot is set in England of 1948. Gilbert is a soldier in Royal force from Jamaica. He is living in a small room in the house owned by Queenie. Th

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Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau · 401 pages

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

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Caleb's Crossing

Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages

Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship

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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

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Coffee Will Make You Black

April Sinclair · 239 pages

Stevie, a young Afro-American woman in the 60s, tries to deal with her sexuality, Black culture, and social identity.

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The Polished Hoe

Austin Clarke · 480 pages

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Cambridge

Caryl Phillips · 187 pages

Dramatic and challenging novel about freedom and prejudice by one of the most important authors of his generationCambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cambridge, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation s

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To Shape a Dragon's Breath

Moniquill Blackgoose · 511 pages

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Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 307 pages

“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded fro

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Martha Quest

Doris Lessing · 319 pages

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Swing Time

Zadie Smith · 464 pages

"An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood frien

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The Pirate's Daughter

Margaret Cezair-Thompson · 432 pages

Errol Flynn washes up on the island in the 'Zaca', his storm-wrecked yacht. Ida Joseph, teenaged daughter of Port Antonio's Justice of the Peace, is intrigued to learn that the 'World's Handsomest Man' is on the island, and makes it her business to meet him. For the jaded swashbuckler, Jamaica is a tropical paradise that offers adventure and the promise of personal salvation. Soon Flynn has made a

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Disgruntled

Asali Solomon · 294 pages

"An elegant, vibrant, startling coming-of-age novel, for anyone who's ever felt the shame of being alive Kenya Curtis is only eight years old, but she knows that she's different, even if she can't put her finger on how or why. It's not because she's Black--most of the other students in the fourth-grade class at her West Philadelphia elementary school are too. Maybe it's because she celebrates Kwan

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Sag Harbor

Colson Whitehead · 288 pages

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in AmericaThe year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his

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Anita and Me

Meera Syal · 336 pages

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A Way in the World

V.S. Naipaul · 369 pages

"Most of Us Know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.". So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum - that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp - which suffuses this extraordinary

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Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

Aime Cesaire · 81 pages

"Aime Cesaire is most well known as the co-creator (with Leopold Senghor) of the concept of negritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, is a masterpiece of immense cultural significance and beauty and became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by

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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

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