Huracan - Softcover

Diana McCaulay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845231961 ISBN 13: 9781845231965

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2012

Synopsis

In the wake of her mother's death, Leigh McCaulay returns to Jamaica after fifteen years away in New York to find her estranged father and discover whether she has a place she can call home. Not least she must re-engage with the complexities of being white in a black country, of being called to account for the oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves.

Interwoven with Leigh's return are the stories of two earlier arrivals, both from Scotland--of the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay, who comes as a precocious youth of sixteen to work as a book-keeper on a sugar estate in 1786, and of John Macaulay who comes in 1886, a naive and sometimes self-deluding Baptist missionary, determined to bring light to the heathen.

For each of these arrivals there are discoveries to be made, often painful, about both Jamaica and themselves. Each must come to terms with the contradictions of a society immured in injustice, racial inequality and endemic violence; a landscape of heartbreaking beauty; amd a people who endure with an unquenchable urge for independence.

About this title

From the Author:

I have written about the beloved island of my birth at different times in her tragic history; I hope I have created an authenticity, a realism. Any mistakes are mine alone.
Diana McCaulay
Kingston, Jamaica

About the Author:

Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer and environmental activist. She is the Founder and Chief Executive of the Jamaica Environment Trust and was awarded the 2005 Euan P. McFarlane Award for Outstanding Environmental Leadership and a 2009 Bronze Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. As a lifelong resident of Kingston, Jamaica's capital city, her novels entice the reader with the unique spirit and complexity of contemporary Jamaica.

Her first novel, Dog-Heart, was published in 2010, won a gold medal in the 2008 Jamaican National Literature awards and was short listed for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short story The Dolphin Catcher won the 2012 Regional Commonwealth Prize and was published by Granta.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1845231961
• ISBN 13: 9781845231965
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276