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Reading lists

9 books by Caribbean authors

Bloodlines

Novelist and poet Fred D'Aguiar brings us a unique novel-in-verse about a passionate love affair between slave and plantation owner. The model is Byron's Don Juan, the method all Fred's own.

A tour de force- A compelling, urgent story which is both sensual and lyrical-Marvellous

The bold, controversial language and the force of the narrative compel and intrigue from the start. This is a short novel with an epic personality, encompassing themes of slavery, race, love and immortality-Wonderful

'D'Aguiar's lithe poetic prose has the deft focus of a camera lens-A beautiful and engaging novel in verse'

Fred D'Aguiar was born in Guyana in 1960 and was raised in South-east London and Guyana. He has held several writing residences, including Northern Arts Literary Fellow, and now divides his time between London and Florida, where he teaches English at the University of Miami. He has been awarded the TS Eliot Prize for poetry, the Guyanese National Poetry Award and the Malcolm X prize for poetry. He also won the 1994 Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Award for The Longest Memory.

Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life. En route they are rescued by an old man who has organised a secret underground railroad to help slaves escape, but they become separated from each other: Faith, the woman, is sold back into slavery and Christy, her lover, punished with forced labour. The novel is narrated by their son who is stuck in time until their story is told.    Using the intricate rhyme-scheme of Byron's wonderfully picaresque Don Juan, D'Aguiar wittily plays with language to create poetry that is dazzling in its inventiveness whilst being utterly readable. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Bloodlines is full of humour, satire, experiment and, above all, life. Its characters are, like the language, brim-full of energy and very sympathetic as they struggle against vicissitude. Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem, do both, the choice is yours.

Airy Hall

Fred D'aguiar was brought up in Guyana. After completing his secondary education in London, he trained as a psychiatric nurse, then read English at the University of Kent and the University of Warwick. He has won several awards for his poetry.

Airy Hall – a collection of linked short stories and a new long poem – will confirm and enhance D'aguiar’s reputation: its bold mingling of public and private themes, its skilful counterpointing of Britain and Guyana, and its combination of graceful evocation with tough argument, engage to produce poems which are tightly-worked, generously inclusive and powerfully arresting.

Mama Dot

Fred D’Aguiar was born in London 1960 of Guyanese parents, but was brought up in Guyana. After completing his secondary education in London, he trained as a psychiatric nurse, then read English at the University of Kent. In 1983 he won the Minority Rights Group Award, and in 1984 the University of Kent’s T. S. Eliot Prize.

Every once in a while, a new poet appears who makes us feel that the contours of contemporary poetry have been significantly changed. Fred D'aguiar is such a poet. Although still in his early twenties, he already has a wholly independent voice, and a powerful grasp of original and strange subjects. Many of these arise from his childhood in Guyana: the first section of Mama Dot comprises a series in which these early years are recalled with a passionately lyrical evocation of landscapes, incidents and family relations. They are sensuous celebrations, but are nevertheless touched with melancholy and nostalgia – qualities which are more fully evident elsewhere in the book, in poems which address the life D’Aguiar now leads in England, and which concentrate on themes of exile. In the final section, ‘Guyanese Days’, he returns once again to the scenes and memories of his childhood. Mama Dot is one of the most exciting first collections to have been published for many years: exhilarating, haunting and restlessly inventive.

The Longest Memory

‘A gripping lyric exploration of the life of Whitechapel, a slave on an 18th century Virginia plantation… a brilliant – and beautiful – achievement.’ Independent on Sunday

A haunting novel whose brevity and directness belie the depths of tragedy it plumbs.

D'Aguiar marks his accomplished arrival as a novelist with this compelling and compassionate work

A short book that speaks volumes about slavery... Keeping his page taut with compression and compassion, D'Aguiar makes The Longest Memory hard to forget

This deceptively simple book resonates long after it is finished

Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 and raised in Guyana and south-east London. He now lives in Florida, where he teaches English at the University of Miami. Author of four novels and four books of poetry, he has been awarded the University of Kent's T.S. Eliot prize for poetry, the Guyanese National Poetry Award and the Malcolm X prize for poetry. He also won the 1994 Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Award for The Longest Memory.

Written in taut, poetic language, THE LONGEST MEMORY is set on a Virginian plantation in the 19th century, and tells the tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules: in learning to read and write, in falling in love with a white girl, the daughter of his owner, and, finally, in trying to escape and join her in the free North. For his attempt to flee, he is whipped to death in front of his family, and this brutal event is the pivot around which the story evolves.

Fred D'aguiar

A Caribbean country on the verge of collapse. A small town called Boundary. A rambling house inhabited by three generations of the Abrahams family. And a little girl who is trying to make sense of it all. 
 
Bethany Bettany is five years old when her father dies and her mother leaves her to fend for herself in the Abrahams household. The place simmers with resentment: her uncles and aunts think her mother killed her father; her grandmother refuses to leave her room. Bethany is the scapegoat for it all. 
 
In Bethany, D'Aguiar has created both a loveable character and a symbol for the search of a nation to make itself whole. If Boundary is Guyana, then Bethany Bettany - a girl torn between two names - is the spirit of its people poised for flight.

Fred D'aguiar

Bethany Bettany

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