Jamaica Reading List
In a recently published New York Times article, “Read Your Way Through Kingston, Jamaica” author Marlon James gives readers a list of novels that capture the complex island of Jamaica.
“And yet, if there is one literary obsession common to all Jamaican writers, it is figuring out what exactly this place is — particularly Kingston, which somehow manages to be five different cities at the same time...Try to find one Jamaican voice and you will get lost in many, since no one sound speaks for all of us. It’s why, every time I try to tell a story of Jamaica, I need a sea of voices to do it.”
Artwork by Raphaelle Macaron
Use this link to read the full article without being a NYT subscriber:
This is my list of novels, stories, poems, and academic texts about jamaica and the Caribbean:
Fiction
Frying Plantain (2019) by Zalika Reid-Benta
The Book of Night Women (2009) by Marlon James
Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) by Olive Senior
Augustown (2016) by Kei Miller’s
Here Comes the Sun (2018) by Nicole Dennis-Benn
John Crow's Devil (2005) by Marlon James
The Pagoda (1999) by Patricia Powell
Pao (2011) by Kerry Young
Brother Man (2007) by Roger Mais
The Marvelous Equations of the Dread (2018) by Marcia Douglas
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
Nonfiction
Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora (2019) by Stuart Hall
Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (2018) by Ruma Chopra
Working Juju: Representations of the Caribbean Fantastic (2019) by Andrea Shaw Nevins
Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (2018) Edited by Maarit Forde and Yanique Hume
Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to Their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Traditions (2009) by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament (2019) by Orlando Patterson
Afro-Atlantic Histories (2022) by Adriano Pedrosa
The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism (2018) by Bianca C. Williams
Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone (2013) by Carol Boyce Davies
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) by Saidiya Hartman
Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733 - 1833 (2018) by Daniel Livesay
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
