The Bread the Devil Knead (Myriad), the first adult novel by Trinidadian Lisa Allen-Agostini, is a powerful story of love, lust, violence, and abuse, set in 1990s Trinidad. “Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty, and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she’s covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home.” Writer and editor Margaret Busby praises the novel as “both unpredictable and unforgettable … dealing with the masquerade of everyday love as well as hidden secrets that are the legacy of family.”

Easily Fooled (Guernica Editions), the latest novel by St. Vincent-born, Canada-based writer H. Nigel Thomas, is the third in his “No Safeguards” quartet. Millington, a gay Vincentian and former Methodist minister, had migrated to Canada, where he now lives with his husband Jay — who he fears is about to depart. “He thought he’d resolved the issues that made him leave, but he comes to understand that psychological trauma, childhood conditioning, parental and community expectations and his own need for community and family valorisation are not easily exorcised.”

In This Other Island (Bookouture), a novel by St. Lucia-born Steffanie Edward published electronically, Yvette is reconnected with her estranged father Joe, who migrated to Britain as part of the Windrush generation. Trying to make peace with their past, Yvette learns of dark secrets in her family history that destroyed her parents’ marriage, and now impinge on her own sense of herself.

Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree), the latest collection by Barbados Poet Laureate Esther Phillips, “explores the fragile territory between remembering and forgetting, both as an individual experience and in the life of a society.” “Phillips’ poems are always lucid and musical,” writes the publisher. “They gain a rewarding complexity from being part of the collection’s careful architecture that offers a richly nuanced inner dialogue about the meaning of experience in time.”

Things I Have Withheld (Canongate), the second book of essays by Jamaica-born Kei Miller, “blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender.” Ranging from Jamaica to Britain, Trinidad to Ethiopia, tackling subjects as diverse as Carnival, family history, and literary criticism, the book “explores the silences in which so many important things are kept … and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.”