How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House (Tinder Press/Little, Brown), the debut novel by Barbadian Cherie Jones, tells “the powerful, intense story of three marriages, and of a beautiful island paradise where, beyond the white sand beaches and the wealthy tourists, lies poverty, menacing violence, and the story of the sacrifices some women make to survive.” It was chosen as the February 2021 selection by the Good Morning America Book Club. “One of Jones’s many gifts,” writes the New York Times, “is the ability to show us flawed human beings with their humanity fully intact, to call us to examine the terrible beast within ourselves.”

Islands at War: Trinidad and Tobago During World War II (Paria Publishing), by historian Bridget Brereton and librarian Karen E. Eccles, is a collection of essays on various aspects of the social and cultural life of T&T during a climactic historical period, with a focus on how women, labour leaders, and literary figures, among others, engaged with the war effort. Elsewhere, the book examines the impact of the war on Tobago, and its role in the evolution of Carnival, calypso, and steelpan.

A jazz virtuoso on trumpet and flugelhorn, and an accomplished poet, Vincentian Ellsworth “Shake” Keane was one of the most gifted Caribbean creatives of his generation. In Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press), writer Philip Nanton offers an eloquent biography of this “shapeshifter” whose life was often restless and turbulent. Born in 1927, Keane migrated to Britain in 1952, where we worked for the BBC, studied literature, and built a reputation as a jazz musician, eventually joining the groundbreaking Joe Harriot Quintet. He later lived in Germany, the United States, and Norway, where he died at the age of 70.

In The Gift of Music and Song: Interviews with Jamaican Women Writers (Peepal Tree Press), Jacqueline Bishop — winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction — brings together conversations with eighteen writers, ranging from icons such as Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior, and Velma Pollard to younger voices like Tanya Shirley, Ann-Margaret Lim, and Millicent A.A. Graham. These interviews create “a space for these writers to talk deeply about writing back to their homeland; about being female voices from Jamaica, how one should represent the country, its rhythms and cadences, and what it means to be a female writer in the world today.”

A River Called Time (Canongate/Akashic), the latest novel by Courttia Newland — a British writer with Barbadian roots — is an ambitious speculative fiction offering alternate histories of London through parallel and sometimes dystopian timelines, which intersect in the consciousness of the protagonist. Combining the plot of a thriller with deep delves into physics and metaphysics, and an enquiry into the pervasiveness of social inequality, the novel imagines an alternate world in which colonialism and slavery never happened, and the contact between Europe and Africa unfolded in a spirit of openness and exchange.