From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman’s courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaids The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one womans inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical prose.

This novel tells the deeply charged story of a womans 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 Xuelas 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. Xuelas is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is the black room of the world that is Xuelas motherlessness and barrenness.

Paperback | 240 pages | 5.38″ x 8.25″