The best genre-busting books about love and other improbable things

This book is different. Part coming-of-age story, part murder “mystery”, wholly a unique love story, it thinks about sexuality, what we consider family to be, and above all, what integrity looks like. And it does this in a way that gives it a wide contemporary and inter-generational appeal. I love that Persaud sets you up, then questions your expectations: she disrupts ideas in and about the LGBTQ community, in feminism, about immigrants, in either-or discourse that says conservative and liberated can’t meet and two and two can’t make five. The language is irresistible (somebody said “addictive”. I think of wine). Love After Love rides on the cadences of Trinidadian speech taken to a poetic level. I’ve rarely read a book so riotously, uproariously lyrical. You’ll re-read, and again, for the sheer joy of hearing utterance in English.

The love triangle in this debut novel is unusual but wholly believable, when you consider the history between its two settings: Jamaica and the USA. A frightened 18-year-old from Kingston’s inner city gives up her baby to the wealthy American couple for whom she works as a maid. Years later when a young American man and his parents come to the island, Dinah is convinced that he is her long-lost son, and she cannot be unconvinced. At the end, we think about the astonishing ways love crosses but never dissolves barriers of race, class, national origin, and above all, family. Sharma Taylor’s purposive genre-bending (love story, crime story, yard fiction), is part of the book’s riches, as is the tenderness of her empathic insight.

For me, growing up in the Caribbean, books that don’t separate between the “naturalistic” world and so-called “other” worlds, always ring uniquely true. Gorée is a transnational story set in Castries, St. Lucia, New York City, USA, Dakar, Senegal, and London, England. It’s the story of a family whose great losses parallel the loss of Africa's children through the transatlantic slave trade and the difficult, if not impossible, return of those stolen away. The novel’s love and loss stories are all in some way are filtered through the door of no return on Gorée Island in Senegal. The stories are not told in the physical realm only and do not only rely on physical portals. Barry's loves and lovers must return to the past and make the journey in spirit too.

This is a wicked stepmother, blind-sided father, devoted siblings story with a difference. Patchett rewrites “Cinderella” and “Hansel and Gretel”, with lots of dark humor (can’t help thinking of Beckett). What’s enchanting? The subtlety, nuance and almost pointillistic detail with which Patchett renders the events so quotidian, so just-down-the-street, that you understand how fairy tales are just an alternative rendering of history, or fact, or the novel. The siblings Danny Conroy and his super-super-protective sister Maeve, have an uncanny bond with each other and the family (Dutch) house to which they must return to sort out the entanglements of false belief and weigh the value of the life they have lived.

I suppose it is inevitable that I list a book to which my own work has been compared (though I have no sense of having been influenced by it, at all). This novel is vintage García Márquez, and nothing is more luminous than the way he uncovers here the “outsize reality”—the mythic real—of everyday lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. The chronicle of a love affair that spans 50 years and finally escapes consummation after surviving a very long marriage and several hundred impossible liaisons, the novel offers a profound insight into the ways myth allows us to carry the sheer weight of living after Columbus.