Fire Rush (Jonathan Cape, UK; Viking, US), a novel sixteen years in the making from Jamaica-born, UK-based Jacqueline Crooks, centres Black womanhood in 1970s London and Bristol. Longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Fire Rush follows protagonist Yamaye through a dancehall and dub-infused club scene, while she yearns for deeper connections to her Jamaican culture. The England Crooks describes in her prose is indelibly steeped in Caribbean customs, from music to food to language patterns: proof of the permanence wrought by migration and resettlement, even in a xenophobic Great Britain.

The Gospel According to the New World (World Editions), by Maryse Condé, translated from the French by Richard Philcox, is a satirical and humorous reinvention of the story of Christ. Longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the novel follows the messianic path of Pascal, born on an island resembling Guadeloupe, who sets out to experience whether the world can be ultimately redeemed through the transformative power of spiritual love. Dictated by the author to her translator husband, the book has been described by 86-year-old Condé as her last. It follows in as strongly comedic and allegorical a vein as her larger body of prizewinning work. 

A Sun to be Sewn (Other Press), by Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, balances both extreme violence and concentrated tenderness in one young girl’s coming of age. Set in the slums of Port-au-Prince, D’Amérique’s debut novel charts a course of personal growth despite often-horrific odds that frequently feels Shakespearean, yet is mired convincingly in a Haitian psychological awareness. The world of the novel is beset with terror, yet open to love and redemption. A prolific poet and playwright, the author has won the Prix de Poésie de la Vocation (2017) and the Apollinaire Discovery Prize (2021). 

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts (Catapult), Soraya Palmer’s debut novel, focuses on sisters Zora and Sasha Porter, both of whom are estranged from their melded Trinidadian and Jamaican heritage. The sisters’ parents kept numerous secrets, none of them easily explained: Zora and Sasha navigate layers of suppressed trauma in order to get to the heart of their own identities. Palmer’s novel doesn’t evade the haunting capacity of the immediate past, nor does it hide from the intergenerational morass of parent-child bonds. The novel impressively homes in on the specific challenges facing diaspora Caribbean youth, who straddle multiple states of being.

Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet), the sophomore poetry collection by Jamaica-born, UK-based Jason Allen-Paisant, reinvents the damning stereotype of Othello’s Moor, in experimental and ekphrastic verses. Thinking with Trees, Allen-Paisant’s first book of poems, won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry: his second collection is as sensitively wrought, more directly interfacing with the politics of Blackness and the hypersexualization of the Black male body. The poems travel through seventeenth-century Venice, morphing into the anthropocene: daring and inventive, they ask searing questions of desire, governable selves, and the act of possessing another.