I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
When Pearline receives news about her ailing father, she abruptly leaves Brooklyn for her childhood home in Jamaica. But Pearline isn’t prepared for a tense reunion with her sisters or for her father’s startling deathbed wish that she repair their long-broken family legacy and find the sister and two brothers no one has seen in more than 50 years.
Moving through time and place, from modern-day Brooklyn and Montego Bay to 1930s Havana and back again, this book is a journey through generational secrets and a family coming to terms with its past.
Sri Lankan photojournalist Maali Almeida is stuck in purgatory and determined to find out how he died. Maali is no saint, and his questionable antics—both his sexual exploits and the questionable work he took on during Sri Lanka’s civil war—come back to haunt him as he slips in and out of places he had been when he was alive.
I loved the irreverence, the humor, and the insights into a civil war I knew little about and I was endlessly fascinated by the portrayal of purgatory and the afterlife.
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida-war photographer, gambler, and closet queen-has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to…
There’s no escaping past actions in this book—from a dying man confessing he assumed the identity of a dead friend and began a new life to the exploits of the Paisley family during colonial-era Jamaica.
I love the way the family stories intertwine, how the book traces the movement of Jamaican people from the Caribbean island to England and America, and the way the ghosts in the family are not just people but also broader things: slavery, colonization, migration, and abandoned families.
Longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A "rich, ambitious debut novel" (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
*An Entertainment Weekly, Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2020 Pick and Buzz Magazine's Top New Book of the New Decade*
Stanford Solomon's shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole…
I loved the unique way Daniel José Older explores the Cuban Revolution and the disappearance of ordinary citizens fighting in the war, including Marisol, whom we first meet as a spirit haunting her nephew Ramon.
Ramon sets out to uncover stories about his missing aunt, and along the way, falls in love and uncovers his mother’s own secrets related to Marisol’s disappearance.
This book reminds me about the interconnectedness of family and how family stories get told and passed on from one generation to another.
The Book of Lost Saints is an evocative multigenerational Cuban-American family story of revolution, loss, and family bonds from New York Times-bestselling author Daniel José Older.
Marisol vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her tenacious spirit visits her nephew, Ramón, in modern-day New Jersey. Her hope: that her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history.
Ramón launches a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous…
This book is a longtime favorite of mine. Toni Morrison was a master at blending the personal story and the political, and in this book, she blends the true story of a mother who kills her child to prevent slave catchers from returning the baby to life as a slave.
Morrison’s fictional Sethe is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed and the memories of her difficult life as a slave. This is one of the novels I return to time after time, both for the beauty of the writing and the portrayal of a mother’s love, guilt, and the lingering impact of slavery.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
Even though I grew up in Jamaica, which is about 334 miles from Haiti, I knew nothing about the 1937 Parsley Massacre, during which thousands of Haitians were executed under the orders of Dominican President Rafael Trujillo.
This book blends the personal love story of Amabelle and Sebastien with the history and politics of that time. I came away from this book with a greater understanding of survival, racism in the Caribbean, and the power of memory.
It is 1937, and Amabelle Desir is a young Haitian woman working as a maid for a wealthy family in the Dominican Republic, across the border from her homeland. The Republic, under the iron rule of the Generalissimo, treats the Haitians as second-class citizens, and although Amabelle feels a strong sense of loyalty to her employers, especially since her own parents drowned crossing the river from Haiti, racial tensions are heightened when Amabelle's boss accidentally kills a Haitian in a car accident. The accident is a catalyst for a systematic round-up of Haitians, ostensibly for repatriation but in fact a…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
Interested in
gay men,
the Cuban Revolution,
and
Ohio?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
gay men,
the Cuban Revolution,
and
Ohio.
