Jamaica Kincaid

After her mother dies at birth, Xuela is left by her father with his laundress for the next seven years in a home where she feels no love or affection, so when she moves in with her father's friends, the LaBattes, she finds pleasure however she can. Reprint.

The Autobiography of My Mother

Iris van der zanden

To know all is an impossibility, but only such a thing would satisfy me.

The impulse to posses is alive in every heart, and some people choose vast plains, some people choose high mountains, some people choose wide seas, and some people choose husbands; i chose to posses myself.

farah farooq

i don’t believe there is such a thing as a bad book by jamaica kincaid. there isnt even an okay ish book. all there is a great book and i will say this about everything i read of hers.

Alexia

Ok, so... This didn't go the way I expected. I would've enjoyed it more if the focus hadn't been so sexualized and more human. And why was there all that unnecessary and unjustified violence against animals? However, I have to admit Kincaid has a beautiful writing style, which makes me curious about how I would get along with the rest of her work. I'll definitely give her another try.

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.

The Autobiography of My Mother

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