Caribbean Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press) is a substantial scholarly collection with a broad historical range, its three volumes covering the periods 1800–1921 (edited by Evelyn O’Callaghan and Tim Watson), 1920–1970 (edited by Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes), and 1970–2020 (edited by Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell). It brings together themed chapters by a diverse array of mostly academic authors, aiming for an assessment of Caribbean literary studies at a time of transition within the field, including a renewed focus on early Caribbean writing and a more expansive sense of the literary canon.

Pandemic Poems: First Wave (self-published), the latest book by esteemed Jamaican writer Olive Senior, collects a sequence of new poems composed in 2020, and originally posted on social media. “Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic — an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment,” and offering a unique personal and collective history of a year that unfolded through a series of grim and unanticipated events.

The Vanishing Girls (Black Coral Publishing), a novel by Barbadian Callie Browning, is a crime thriller featuring a mortician protagonist whose funeral home is tasked with managing the bodies of the victims of a serial killer — and who solves the mystery of the killer’s identity when the police prove helpless.

A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke University Press), by US scholar Kaiama L. Glover, is an insightful study of “unruly female protagonists” in Caribbean fiction “who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities…. The women of these texts” — novels by authors such as Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, and Marlon James — “offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood.”