Description

06

Description

02

Bibliography

 

Marisel Vera emerges as a major new voice in contemporary fiction with this capacious (The New Yorker) novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Up in the mountainous region of Utuado, Vicente Vega and Valentina Sanchez labor to keep their coffee farm from the creditors. When the great San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 brings devastating upheaval, the young couple is lured along with thousands of other puertorriquenos to the sugar plantations of Hawaii, where they are confronted by the hollowness of Americas promises of prosperity. Depicting the roots of Puerto Rican alienation and exodus, which resonates especially today, The Taste of Sugar is a gorgeous feat of storytelling (Tayari Jones).

Description

06

Bibliography

Miller is a name to watch.""—The Independent ""This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing.""—Granta Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica's last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of ""warning"": the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear—people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with the mysterious ""Mr. Writer Man,"" who has a tale of his own to share, one that will cast Adamine's life in an entirely new light. In a story about magic and migration, stories and storytelling, and the New and Old Worlds, we discover it is never one person who owns a story or has the right to tell it. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1978, Kei Miller is the author of The Same Earth, winner of the Una Marson Prize for Literature; and Fear of Stones, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. His most recent poetry collection has been shortlisted for the Jonathan Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2008 he was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Miller currently divides his time between Jamaica and Scotland.