Jamaica Kincaid

The Autobiography of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid

• 1998 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1997 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1996 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 18.48

Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry.

My Brother

Jamaica Kincaid

• 1997 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
• Score: 6.47

Jamaica Kincaid’s incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother Devon Drew’s life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. Kincaid’s unblinking record of a life that ed too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

Annie John

Jamaica Kincaid

• 1985 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 6.35

Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid’s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice—urgent, demanding to be heard—is one that will not soon be forgotten by readers.

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence,…

At the Bottom of the River

Jamaica Kincaid

• 1984 PEN-faulkner finalist
• Score: 6.34

Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean—family, manners, and landscape—as distilled and transformed by Kincaid’s special style and vision.

Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of…