peepal tree press ltd yorkshire (79 results)

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Eddie Wade has recently returned from the US oilfields. He is determined to sink his own well and make his fortune in the 1920s Trinidad oil-rush. His sights are set on Sonny Chatterjees failing cocoa estate, Kushi, where the ground is so full of oil you can put a stick in the ground and see it bubble up. When a fortuitous meeting with businessman Tito Fernandez brings Eddie the investor he desperately needs, the three men enter into a partnership. A friendship between Tito and Eddie begins that will change their lives forever, not least when the oil starts gushing. But their partnership also brings Eddie into contact with Ada, Titos beautiful wife, and as much as they try, they cannot avoid the attraction they feel for each other. Fortune, based on true events, catches Trinidad at a moment of historical change whose consequences reverberate down to present concerns with climate change and environmental destruction. As a story of love and ambition, its focus is on individuals so enmeshed in their desires that they blindly enter the territory of classic Greek tragedy where actions always have consequences. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Soft cover. Condition: Near Fine. A near fine copy of the softcover edition. The text is wholly unmarked, pristine, and the binding is bright and fresh in appearance, with no creasing to the spine. A sharp copy.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Red is a powerful new anthology of work by Black British poets. "Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about Red is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows." Margaret Busby Featuring: Jackie Kay * Patience Agbabi * Nii Ayikwei Parkes * Raman Mundair * Maya Chowdhry * Dorothea Smartt * Fred DAguiar * Linton Kwesi Johnson * Bernardine Evaristo * Roi Kwabena * John Lyons * Lemn Sissay * Grace Nichols * Jack Mapanje * Daljit Nagra * John Agard * Gemma Weekes * Wangui Wa Goro and many more. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Rooted in Puerto Rico, these well-crafted poems - in Spanish-speckled English -also explore experience in other parts of the Caribbean, and Latin America, the USA and England. Loretta Collins Klobah manages an impressive range of forms in these meditations on history, art, love, suffering and spirituality. The mood, occasionally indignant, is most often compassionate and celebratory. The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman is a remarkable contribution to Caribbean literature. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The poet and musician Anthony Joseph met and spoke to Lord Kitchener just once, in 1984, when he found the calypso icon standing alone for a moment in the heat of Port of Spains Queens Park Savannah, one Carnival Monday afternoon. It was a pivotal meeting in which the great calypsonian, outlined his musical vision, an event which forms a moving epilogue to Kitch, Josephs unique biography of the Grandmaster. Lord Kitchener (1922 - 2000) was one of the most iconic and prolific calypso artists of the 20th century. He was one of calypsos most loved exponents, an always elegantly dressed troubadour with old time male charisma and the ability to tap into the musical and cultural consciousness of the Caribbean experience. Born into colonial Trinidad in 1922, he emerged in the 1950s, at the forefront of multicultural Britain, acting as an intermediary between the growing Caribbean community, the islands they had left behind, and the often hostile conditions of life in post War Britain. In the process Kitch, as he was affectionally called, single handedly popularised the calypso in Britain. Kitch represents the first biographical study of Aldwyn Roberts, according to calypso lore, christened Lord Kitchener, because of his stature and enthusiasm for the art form. Utilising an innovative, polyvocal style which combines life-writing with poetic prose, the narrative alternates between first person anecdotes by Kitcheners fellow calypsonians, musicians, lovers and rivals, and lyrically rich fictionalised passages. By focussing equally on Kitcheners music as on his hitherto undocumented private and political life, Joseph gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet, to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: Fine. Azucar is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from the big imperialist neighbour to the North. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to his life in Fumaz. As scientist, he must find some way of rescuing the islands famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as a farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the islands unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size. This is a novel of ideas how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? It has much to say about the impact of colonialism on the fragile ecology of the island but it is the pursuit of love and the tragedy of death, the interweaving of moments of harmony and moments of conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this sometimes zany narrative. And there is always the texture of the language to enjoy in a book whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The title of Wife is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems with a disabused feminist perspective on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, but they are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other.There are poems that are cutting about male self-deceptions and arrogation of power that speak to poems displaying deep sensitivity to the aloneness of the embattled male psyche. This is not verse in the confessional mode, but poems that take on other voices, other histories and explore the relationship between experiences and the way we mythologise them.These spare, elegant poems are not only intensely focused on the body and attentive to the minutiae of domestic space, but they make connections to the worlds of family, church, village and nation and, in one particular poem, the soul. Their context is a Virgin Islands past and a Black American present, but these are poems committed to an enlarged human future. These witty, sharp and carefully crafted poems focus on marriage, intimacy, relationships, power and the body, looking both at the minutiae of domestic space and wider contexts of family, church, village and nation. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. John Robert Lees Christian faith is always present in his perceptions of experience and in the shaping of his art, and even those who dont share his faith should be grateful for this because he gives us a poetry of an empathetic sensitivity to human frailty, celebrations of the beauty of enduring love, prophetic anger in calling out injustices and a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and the terrible insults we offer it. It's a magnificent and varied collection in which different kinds of voices -- all JRL -- mesh together: the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal. Its a collection in which four major suites of poems give the whole an organic unity, which is not to say that the individual poems that fall outside the suites don't make their fine contribution. The Belmont Portfolio, dedicated to Earl Lovelace, records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad in poems that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure, that see the numinous behind the ordinary. The Office Hours suite, with its gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences how we live through our diurnal cycles. There is the rousing, prophetic, Old Testament righteous anger of the Watchman sequence, which reflects on the hell of living in Babylon and the gap between the deceits of liberal democracies and the ghastly realities of their global crimes. In the last sequence, What Remains to be Said the poet emerges to the front of the stage and speaks directly and confidentially to the reader. It is a sequence that gathers together what must be treasured as sustenance through this Purgatorio of our times, reflections on how one can speak in an era where you are collared in faith in agnostic seasons, where the frequency of the deaths of those with whom you have shared the struggle is a haunting against my faith in the Tree of Life and a wondering, slightly tongue-in-cheek: approaching mid-seventies, what do I know? This poetry offers an empathetic sensitivity to human frailty, celebrations of the beauty of enduring love, anger in calling out injustices and a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and the terrible insults we offer it. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Patterflash embraces the performative, self-ironising aesthetic of campness but, as a mask, it is a complex and very malleable one, capable of showing features of tenderness, bravery, righteous anger and sometimes sadness and alarm as well as the comedic. Within a collection that displays an engaging variety of language registers, both high and low in tone, the masking sometimes makes use of Polari, the gay street language that simultaneously reveals and conceals, excludes and invites, estranges and makes familiar. The collection connects the poet as a wry, humane observer of the scene, particularly as conducted in Manchester, and the persona of Adam Lowe as both actor in and narrator of his own dramas, who performs, exults and sometimes suffers in a wide range of guises and disguises.What unites them is the urge to embrace the possibilities of being exactly who you want to be whatever the complications or consequences of your choice. From the four-year-old boy who, though always easy in his mixedness of race, also wants to wear a blonde womans wig without any angst of self-contradiction, through the poems delighting in the frank physicality of gay sex, to the mature man experiencing domestic contentment, Adam Lowe takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Adam Lowe's debut collection takes us on a journey rich in observation and always in a poetry that makes an art of patterflash. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Bath of Herbs is her beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an othered, unmappable, positionality.It honours the lives of Black and Brown women and asks how they can reclaim space, both practically and conceptually. It celebrates and mourns the unspoken pain and joys of motherhood; of menstrual cycles, childbirth, tending to sick children with life-threatening illnesses, the death of mothers, love in all its myriad forms and the desire to escape the constraints of domestic and family life towards different kinds of freedoms. It also revisits the confusing world of childhood; the inexplicable actions of adults and the bullies who despise perceived difference.There is her ownership of a writerly inheritance handed down from her grandfather, the Black Martiniquan writer, Joseph Zobel, but also an awareness that this heritage has involved a movement away from the Black peasant world Zobel wrote about towards a comfortable Europeanness of being.Other poems address the security of a middle-class life and the many pleasures it offers but also how that world can be broken apart by death, by serious illness, by the fear that the channels of communication in a marriage have gone down and how, as a woman expected to hold everything together, one is sometimes forced to take refuge in the wildest fantasies.Linking the whole is an engagement with the possibilities of healing: as in the bath of herbs in which her grandmother bathed her mother after giving birth; in the physicality of running and purificatory swimming in a river; in the care a hospital gives to her child and in the healing power of the natural world. Beautifully crafted, honest and thoughtful first collection which explores the complexity of mixed-race, hybrid identities and relationships to the English and Welsh mountains, fells, rivers and shorelines from an othered, unmappable, positionality. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In poems that express an oblique and resonant disquiet ('people dream of a lady/ in a boat, dressed in red/ petticoat, adrift and weeping') and a sequence that addresses memories of the death of the Grenadian revolution, too painful to confront until now, Merle Collins writes of a Caribbean adrift, amnesiac and in danger of nihilistic despair. But she also achieves a life-enhancing and consoling perspective on those griefs. She does this by revisiting the hopes and humanities of the people involved, recreating them in all their concrete particularity, or by speaking through the voice of an eighty-year-old woman 'making miracle/ with little money because turn hand is life lesson', and in writing poems that celebrate love, the world of children and the splendours of Caribbean nature. Her poems take the 'new dead ancestors back to/ mountain to feed the fountain/ of dreams again. Bucking the despair of modern challenges facing the Caribbean region presented by globalism, the International Monetary Fund, and the failure of many political leaders, this collection of poetry offers a consoling and healing message on such griefs from the Grenadian and Caribbean perspective. The strength of the local people is presented in the particularities of a resilient 8o-year-old woman who embodies the faith of the Caribbeans. The portrait of the end of the Grenadian revolution enhances these celebrations of love, children, and the strength of the Caribbean people. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In her fourth collection, Seni Seneviratne will extend her reputation as a fine poet whose incisive social and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of her collections, where individual poems are enriched by their place in the whole and their dialogue with each other. In this collection, the connecting thread is the bird, both in its observed physical otherness and as an image that carries cultural and historical resonances. In the first section of the collection, the imagery of the caged bird runs through a sequence of poems that meditate on the silenced voices of enslaved Black children, trapped as picturesque, consumerist trophies in those 18th century paintings to be found in English stately homes, which celebrate their occupants gaining of new wealth through the slave trade and slave-grown sugar. The second section of the collection yokes Seneviratnes skills as a poet with her deep knowledge of the ways of birds in their natural environment the freedom they possess in their otherness from human concerns. The final section revisits the myth of Philomena from Ovids Metamorphoses and puts this tongueless woman/nightingale in dialogue with the gender fluidity of Tiresias to explore different forms of silencing in history and the present. As a poet who balances careful observation with imaginative flight, Seni Seneviratne addresses both heart and mind. Incisive social and political concerns are matched by her meticulous care with the shape of each poem and the architecture of this collection, where individual poems are enriched by their place in the whole and their dialogue with each other. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. A Guardian biography of the year 2022 Non-Fiction winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023 This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender. The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur's silk-swathed memoiris in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen. Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott,Love the Dark Daysfollows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post- independent India to her family's migration to post-colonial Trinidad. Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity,Love the Dark Daysreassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire. "Reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire" - Guardian Best Biographies of 2022 "Compelling" The Observer "A gem of a memoir. Monique Roffey is spot on when she calls it a blaze of a book" The Bookseller. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. This collection of essays celebrates 10 years of the SI Leeds Literary prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women writers.These are important words spoken by important women about the lives they have lived, their experiences, and all the things theyve really wanted to write about but have had trouble getting commissioned, due to narrow expectations of the publishing industry.Essays include: Why I Write, Discouragement and Courage, The Versions of Me You Do Not See, Three Wise Women, Writing, Race and Sex.Contributing writers include Suad Kamardeen, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Gail Boland, Irenosen Okojie, Wenyan Lu, Amita Murray, Mahsuda Snaith, Shereen Tadros, Winnie M Li, Fiona Goh, Saima Mir, Huma Qureshi. This collection of essays celebrates the SI Leeds Literary prize for unpublished fiction by black and Asian women writers. These are important words spoken by important women about the lives they have lived, their experiences, and all the things theyve really wanted to write about but have had trouble getting commissioned. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali munchi (secretary) employed by the East India Company, travelled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul Emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe. Written in Persian, 'Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet' or 'Wonderful Tales about Europe' is an entertaining, unique and culturally valuable document. The Mirza was in no sense a colonial subject, and whilst he wrote frankly about what he felt accounted for India's decline and Europe's contemporary ascendance, he was a highly educated, culturally self-confident observer with a sharp and quizzical curiosity about the alien cultures he encountered. His account of his sea-voyage, taking in Mauritius and the Cape, combines 'modern' ethnological notes on the countries he passed with an older tradition of travellers' tales.His accounts of visits to the theatre, the circus, freakshows, the 'mardrassah [University] of Oxford', Scotland, of the racial alarms his presence sometimes provoked and of his impressions of British moral codes are considered and acute, making for fascinating reading. He writes of his perceptions of the commercial energy of London, of the British constitution, of politics and of religious practice and beliefs in England. He records the several conversations he has with his English hosts about the similarities and differences between Islam and Christianity, showing much more familiarity with the latter than that of his hosts with the former. Writing in Persian he makes no effort to flatter the English. He is not impressed with the 'filthy habits of the firinghees' [Whites]) Kaiser Haq's scholarly, modern translation is the first to appear in English since the original abridged and flawed translation of 1827. The Wonders of Vilayet is an important document. Not until Gandhi's early 20th century accounts is there a similarly extended expression of South Asian perceptions of the West.In this respect, this book is salutary complement to Western accounts of the 'Otherness' of India, orientalism in reverse. In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali secretary employed by the East India Company, traveled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe. This is an entertaining, unique, and culturally valuable document of those journeys. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. As the narrative mode across cultures and time, the short story form wings from oral "folktales" to myths of origin, from parables of caution to contemporary narratives of disclosure, disquiet and discovery. Humans have always valued the short story as a way to make sense of the world, and their place in it. Closure is essentially about human striving.The first Black British short story anthology since IC3 (2000), Closure illustrates that journey. Where IC3 voiced a burning for self-definition, Closure offers contemporary conversations of "Black Britishness" - a lived reality that is like air or breath or blood. The breadth of this experience is expressed through a variety of form and tone; of stylistic ranges and the richness of its diverse themes. "Closure" as a title invites a subversive response; this anthology is filled with stories which, like lives, rarely end in the way we might imagine. Closure is an Inscribe publication for Peepal Tree Press. Humans have always valued the short story as a way to make sense of the world, and their place in it. This anthology of short stories offers contemporary conversations of "Black Britishness" - a lived reality that is like air or breath or blood. Featuring Monica Ali, Fred D'Aguiar, Bernardine Evaristo and many more! Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011.Dog-Heart is a novel about the well-meaning attempt of a middle-class single mother to transform the life of a boy from the ghetto who she meets on the street. Set in present-day, urban Jamaica, Dog-Heart tells the story from two alternating points of view those of the woman and the boy. They speak in the two languages of Jamaica that sometimes overlap, sometimes display their different origins and world views. Whilst engaging the reader in a tense and absorbing narrative, the novel deals seriously with issues of race and class, the complexity of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change by their own actions."Diana McCaulay's debut novel Dog-Heart is a harsh and poignant tableau . exploring the relationship between poverty, education, and crime, and tying those back to a national history of violence, violation, and wilful neglect. McCaulay, an environmental activist, submitted her then-unpublished manuscript to the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission's National Creative Writing Competition in 2008 and won the gold medal. The book is a passionate plea for child poverty alleviation couched in a laudable literary format."Lisa Allen-Agostini, Caribbean Review of Books Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines th Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. It is 1963, one year after Independence, and Trinidadians are beginning to wonder what they can expect. Anna takes a temporary post at a remote post office in a small coastal town, hoping to escape a failed relationship, and the drama, pressures and politics of her city life. But neither time or space is granted, as the life of Macaima passes through the post office, and Anna reluctantly begins to take on the villagers' stories - which prove to be just as complicated and enmeshed in the social, cultural and political issues that divide the nation as her own. Long before the year is up, Anna has been immersed in an intense seasoning in Macaima that will change her for ever. Macaima is a magical place of intense and unforgettable characters, which Jennifer Rahim draws with exceptional psychological subtlety. And Anna herself - flawed, a little prickly and sometimes too ready to jump to conclusions - is a complex narrator whom we ultimately trust and care for. As an historical novel it asks probing questions about the nature of the means and ends of the project of Independence and its failures with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality.Goodbye Bay is simply one of the very best Caribbean novels to have been written, and not just in recent years. Written in a seamless mix of sharply observed realism with moments of rich humour, and of numinous poetic intensity, it tells a gripping story with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption. Goodbye Bay is simply one of the very best Caribbean novels to have been written, and not just in recent years. The perfect summer read, its seamless mix of sharply observed realism, poetic intensity and warm humour tells a gripping story with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. "Connecting Medium links the past to the present, the Caribbean to England, mothers to fathers. Here are poems about identity and culture, generations and the future. A powerful sequence of poems about a black Medusa. Poems that link the material world to the spiritual one. Poems that recreate a sixties childhood in South London in vivid detail. Connecting Medium is full of energy and life. Hers is a bright, passionate voice." Jackie Kay Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Bending and manipulating the linear narrative structures of conventional fiction, this stark and brutal novel--originally published in 1953--is a powerful reflection on colonial Jamaica and the condition of the urban poor, told through the voices and stories of several boldly drawn characters. Beginning with Surjue, a man arrested and imprisoned following a botched robbery, who struggles for survival within Jamaica's colonial prison, this tale bears an unflinching and distressing realism that combines poetic spirit, tragic vision, and prophetic rage, while offering an acute look at the reality the poor in 1950s Jamaica. This novel, set in a yard which is a microcosm of Kingston slum life, sets out as Mais himself said to give "a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful condition of the working classes." Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Presenting some of the most noteworthy pieces from a remarkably influential West Indian poet, this anthology sheds light on the lesser-known literary accomplishments of Una Marson. Revealing the work of a woman whose writing pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworth-inspired passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to marginalized subjects, this collection includes, in addition to her well-known poems, previously unpublished work from the 1930s through the 1950s. Striving to answer the question of how one writes as a modern black woman reaching out to the poor and powerless, this extensive selection embodies an exceptionally significant poetic achievement. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Barbara Jenkins writes about the experiences of a personal and family-centred life in Trinidad with great psychological acuteness, expanding on the personal with a deep awareness of the economic, social and cultural contexts of that experience. She writes about a childhood and youth located in the colonial era and an adult life that began at the very point of Trinidads independent nationhood, a life begun in poverty in a colonial city going through rapid change. It is about a life that expanded in possibility through an access to an education not usually available to girls from such an economic background. This schooling gave the young Barbara Jenkins the intense experience of being an outsider to Trinidads hierarchies of race and class. She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women. As for so many Caribbean people, opportunity appeared to exist only via migration, in her case to Wales in the 1960s. But there was a catch in the arrangement that the years in Wales had put to the back of her mind: the legally enforceable promise to the Trinidadian government that in return for their scholarship, she had to return. She did, and has lived the rest of her life to date in Trinidad, an experience that gives her writing an insider/outsider sharpness of perception.'From her childhood in colonial Port of Spain, to becoming a migrant student and young mother in Wales and then returning to Trinidad post-Independence, Jenkins tells her own life story with the emotional sensitivity of a natural storyteller, the insight of a philosopher, the scope of a historian and the good humour of a Trini. This beautifully written and moving memoir will feel achingly familiar to anyone who knows what it is like to navigate race, class and girlhood while growing up in the West Indies, anyone who has ever felt like an outsider. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds. In this memoir, the celebrated novelist and retired teacher Barbara Jenkins writes with wit, vividness and insight of growing up in colonial Trinidad, a migrant life in Wales, and her return to Trinidad with her husband and first child in the post-independence era. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. When the charismatic Isaac Shepherd returns to the island of San Christobal it is lead by an independence movement that for a time unites all the island's diverse groups Africans, Indians and Chinese against the colonial establishment. But each group relates in different ways to colonialism and their failure to communicate openly about those differences leads to mutual suspicions that provide their enemies with the means to destroy them. Parallel to the world of the political leaders is the tight bond between their sons, including the white son of the reactionary chief of police, and Ma Shepherd, Isaac Shepherd's mother. They are the Age and Innocence of the novel's title, though the nature of innocence is thoroughly deconstructed. In what is still one of the most insightful explorations of the nature of race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial societies, Lamming reaches far beneath the surface of ethnic difference into the very heart of the processes of perception, communication and coming to knowledge. In a classic novel that is tense and tragic in its denouement and throughout deeply enquiring, Lamming has written one of the half dozen most important Caribbean novels of all time.George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927. He is the author of several of the most important Caribbean novels of all time. An insightful exploration of the nature of race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial Caribbean societies, this tale follows the charismatic Isaac Shepherd, who returns to the island of San Cristobal to lead an independence movement that unites the island's diverse groups against the colonial establishment. However, mutual suspicions arise as the groups fail to communicate openly about their different perspectives on colonialism, making them all vulnerable. Paralleling the world of political turmoil is the bond between Ma Shepherd, Isaac's mother, and the sons of the sparring politicians, including the white son of a reactionary chief of police. Tense and tragic, this novel delves into the implications of ethnic difference as it investigates the process of perception, communication, and knowledge. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The mother of the revolutionary firebrand Malcolm X was a Grenadian woman born at the turn of the 20th century in a small rural community in a deeply colonial society where access to education had only just begun for the children of working people. She emigrated to Canada and then the USA, where she became involved in the struggle for Black dignity and human rights then led by Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm X and others of his siblings have testified to their mother's powerful influence on their lives. Within the sparse facts of Louise Langdon Norton Little's biography, Merle Collins, the distinguished Grenadian novelist, has created a moving and deeply feminist work of fiction that gives vivid inwardness to both the heroism and tragedy of a life that involved fighting the Ku Klux Klan, discovering that male comrades in the struggle could be abusers at home, recognition of her skills as an organiser, but also a period of mental collapse that saw her incarcerated in a mental hospital until her family fought for her release. What Merle Collins dramatizes is the meeting of a collective struggle for equal rights with an individual life profoundly shaped by growing up with her forceful matriarchal grandmother and by her schooling. In the classroom she meets teachers who show Oseyan, Louise's family name, how to turn the imperialist ideology of her schoolbooks on its head. These are the contexts of Oseyan's life, but what Merle Collins most profoundly gives us is its breathing texture, through a mix of fictive narrative, letters and poetry, with episodes of great warmth, exuberant humour and drama, as well as the pathos of separation from community. Through a mix of fictive narrative, letters and poetry, Ocean Stirrings tells the story of the mother of Malcolm X. From the shores of Grenada to Canada and the USA, this is a powerful and poignant tribute to a remarkable woman and an important chapter in the history of the civil rights movement. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Set in the period before and through the Bangladeshi war of independence, this novel has at its heart the continuing friendship between three boys with a love of cinema, whose loyalty into adulthood has surprising outcomes. Bulbul, the central character, is a journalist who witnesses and experiences the clash between individual struggles for meaning in a world torn apart by war, genocide and religious exclusions. Set in the period before and through the Bangladeshi war of independence, this novel has at its heart the continuing friendship between three boys with a love of cinema, whose loyalty into adulthood has surprising outcomes. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. A few years ago, Kamau Brathwaite described Cyril Dabydeen as 'one of the most confident and accomplished voices in the Caribbean diaspora this side of the late 20th century. Now in the 21st century there is the opportunity to savour the growth and achievement of over thirty years. From his first Canadian publications, Goatsong, Distances, This Planet Earth, Heart's Frame and Elephants Make Good Stepladders from the 1970s and early 80s, to his Canadian publications of the 1990s, Stoning the Wind and Born in Amazonia, not forgetting his two Peepal Tree publications, Islands Lovelier than a Vision and Discussing Columbus, Cyril Dabydeen has selected those poems that best represent the journey he has made across multiple boundaries. From his roots as an Asian whose grandparents migrated as indentured labourers from 19th century India, from his shaping as a Guyanese growing up during a period of intense national ferment, and his life as an adult in Canada, Cyril Dabydeen has shaped a vision that makes an enlightening virtue of heterogeneity. Not merely a Guyanese exile, but a writer who has immersed himself in the landscapes, history and lived experience of Canada (and without losing the insistent promptings of Guyanese memory and concern), Dabydeen's poetry shows the rich possibilities inherent in combining immigrant and diasporic selves. His work ranges across the confessional, the narrative and the mythic but always with an unwavering integrity in seeking the interior truth of the poem. He writes with a conversational directness, a clarity born of careful craft, but with an obliqueness of angle and density of image that constantly shifts the reader into new and rewarding frames of reference.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories. With a clarity drawn from careful craft, this collection of poems features 30 years of work from a Guyanese Canadian deeply immersed in the transformations of the immigrant experience and able to reflect on a rich personal history. Whether concerned with Guyanese memory or the Canadian present, these poems engage the reader with an open, conversational tone. Encompassing confessional, narrative, and mythic styles, this work is at home in vast poetic and geographic territories and sheds light on a life and career that has spanned genres and nations. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural Englands links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britains cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness. Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial connections of country houses and public spaces. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner's celebrated painting 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying'. Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting. Turner was described Caryl Phillips as "a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited", and by Hanif Kureishi as "Magnificent, vivid and original." In addition to the title poems, Turner contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey. David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Colonial Countryside is a book of commissioned poems and short stories produced by ten global majority writers featuring National Trust houses with significant colonial histories. This includes properties whose owners engaged in the slavery business, in colonial administration or who were involved with the East India Company or British rule in India.Historians have accompanied these pieces with commentaries detailing the evidence upon which each creative commission was based. The book ends with a photo essay by the projects commissioned photographer, Ingrid Pollard, the Turner Prize shortlisted artist who has pioneered critical interventions into the supposed whiteness of the British countryside.Peter Kalus story gives an account of Richard Watt of Speke Hall reflecting on his Jamaican experiences; Karen Onojaifes story is set in Charlecote Park where a once-favoured Black page finds himself cut adrift; Jacqueline Crooks magical realist tale brings together an abused Indian princess and enslaved African employed in the mahogany trade; Ayanna Lloyd Banwo has written about Diego, the Spanish-speaking African who became Drakes closest confidante; Masuda Snaiths short story cycle tracks the cross-currents of empire across Lord Curzons Kedleston Hall; Maria Thomass account of Penrhyn Castle links past and present. It is a gothic tale of history biting back. Malachis story features a young Black man who dates a white girl with a taste for country house visiting, including Calke Abbey. Other contributions include poetic meditations on artefacts to be found in country houses. Hannah Lowe reflects on the taste for Chinoiserie, Seni Seneviratne gives voice to the enslaved children trapped within the frames of 18 th century art and Andre Bagoo makes connections between William Blathwayt of Dyrham Park and two stands featuring kneeling African men, brought to the house by his uncle in the seventeenth century. Colonial Countryside is a book of commissioned poems and short stories produced by ten global majority writers featuring National Trust houses with significant colonial histories. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. The Guyanese poet Martin Carter was without question one of the major poets of the English language of our time. In the Caribbean, Carter has long been regarded as one of the great poets who chronicled the journey from colonialism to independence, alongside such figures as Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott, Nicholas Guillen and Kamau Brathwaite. While his earlier poems have become classics of socialist literature, translated into many languages, and are among the foundation stones of Caribbean poetry, they have hardly been acknowledged in more general accounts of poetry in English. It was too easy for lazy critics and anthologists to dismiss him as 'merely' a political poet, one who swore, as he put it in one poem, to use his shirt as 'a banner for the revolution.'In fact, looking at Carter's work overall it is hard to think of a contemporary poet writing in English who showed more concern for craft, who measured his utterance with greater care. His later work, while it never lost its political edge, was more oblique and cerebral than the overtly political poems of his youth. It sits comfortably alongside that of fellow South American poets Valejo, Neruda and Paz. They are his contemporaries in every sense; his work is of that originality, stature and elemental force.This book sets out to celebrate Martin Carter's life and work and to establish a context for reading his poetry. It locates the several facets of Carter's work in the historical and cultural circumstances of his time, in Guyana, in the Caribbean. It includes essays by many leading academics and scholars of Caribbean literature and history. It is distinguished particularly by a collection of responses to Carter's work by other creative writers, both his contemporaries and a younger generation for whom Carter's work and commitment has been a powerful influence on their own thinking and practice. As well as demonstrating the profound respect in which he is held as a writer, what emerges most strongly from this group of essays and poems from his fellow writers is the extent to which he was loved and admired as a man who - despite the turmoil Guyana has experienced over the last fifty years - remained true to his fundamental belief in the dignity of humankind.Contributors include John Agard, Edward Baugh, Kamau Brathwaite, Stewart Brown, Jan Carew, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Michael Gilkes, Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, Kendel Hippolyte, Louis James, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Eusi Kwayana, George Lamming, Ian McDonald, Mark McWatt, Mervyn Morris, Grace Nichols, Ken Ramchand, Gordon Rohlehr, Rupert Roopnaraine, Andew Salkey and many others."All Are Involved is a difficult book to review. Its contents are so packed, so vital, the statements so well made that paraphrasing them becomes an act of egregious violence. Here is Martin Carter, that "gifted, paradoxical man" (p.45), that "friendly, dreamful, dangerous man" (p.370), analysed, extolled, lavished with the recognition which eluded him in life because of the politics of his poetry, and the poignant truth and moral force of that politics. This book demonstrates how wrong we were to have neglected Carter's voice, how diminished. All Are Involved is a treasure so empowering, a tribute we pay through Martin Carter to all that is human in us. It is a most enduring legacy."Niyi Osundare, World Literature TodayStewart Brown is the editor of several major anthologies as well as critical studies of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter. A critical anthology evaluating the work of the poet and critic. Essays deal with the biographical, historical, political and literary contexts of his writing, provide detailed readings of his poetry and critical writings, and offer discussions by younger C Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.