When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton), the debut novel by Trinidadian Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, is set in a fictionalised version of Port of Spain called Port Angeles. A story about love — between the two protagonists, Darwin and Yejide — family, ancestry, death, and the afterlife, the novel injects magical realist elements into a compelling portrait of a contemporary Caribbean society, creating an original mythology linking past and present. Pre-publication, the novel was named one of the top ten fiction debuts of 2022 by the UK Observer.

Moon Witch, Spider King (Riverhead), the second volume in the Dark Star Trilogy by acclaimed Jamaican author Marlon James, is not a sequel — rather, it offers an alternate account of the events told in its predecessor Black Leopard, Red Wolf, this time from the perspective of Sogolon the Moon Witch. Drawing equally on African myth and history and the author’s prodigious imagination, Moon Witch, Spider King questions what truth might be in a fictional narrative, and how circumstance shapes every individual’s understanding of what did or didn’t happen.

We Are Not Wearing Helmets (TriQuarterly), the fifth book of poems by T&T-born, US-based Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, is described as a collection of “political love poems,” exploring the lives and predicaments of women of colour in the US. “These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honour, and endurance,” writes the publisher. “They are salve and balm.”

Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream (Viking) is a timely and deeply introspective memoir by Tiffanie Drayton, who was born in T&T and brought up in the US. The book uses the author’s personal experiences to investigate the toll of systemic racism and what the “American Dream” might actually mean for Black people — and how her understanding of these issues changes when she returns to Tobago — now an adult — to make a life and find a community there.

In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Simon and Schuster UK) by Helen Rappaport is a full-length biography of a Jamaican icon who recent scholarship has revealed as a major figure in Victorian British history, though she was nearly forgotten for decades after her death. Born in Jamaica, Seacole migrated to Panama before moving to Britain in the 1850s. On the outbreak of the Crimean War, she travelled to the battlefield, earning fame as a nurse and comforter of wounded soldiers — “the most famous Black celebrity of her generation.”

Glory Dead (Peepal Tree Press), the latest in the publisher’s Caribbean Modern Classics Series, is an account of Trinidad in the late 1930s by the left-wing British author Arthur Calder-Marshall. First published in 1939, the book is unsparing in its exploration of social conditions in colonial Trinidad, while its author has “a novelist’s eye for characters and situations,” making it lively and highly readable. With a new introduction by historian Bridget Brereton.

100+ Voices for Miss Lou (University of the West Indies Press), edited by Jamaican writer and scholar Opal Palmer Adisa, is a massive new anthology of essays, poems, interviews, and other writings celebrating the late Louise Bennett-Coverley, Jamaica’s beloved poet, who died in 2006. The list of contributors is a virtual who’s who of Jamaican literature and performance, with a sprinkling of writers from other Caribbean territories, all paying tribute to one of Jamaica’s most influential cultural figures.