Equal to Mystery: In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo (Peepal Tree Press) by Christopher Laird traces the unlikely life and times of Trinidad’s mysterious late novelist, author of No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays. Taking a keen interest in Ladoo’s history — both on and off the record — Laird retraces the author’s migration to Canada, his relationships with fellow writers, and Ladoo’s heretofore-unmined repository of unpublished letters and archival materials. The results portray a fascinating personage, at once obsessed with fame and haunted by numerous iniquities that thwarted him. Equal to Mystery is the first major monograph to be published on Ladoo.

Sweet Undoings (Deep Vellum Publishing) by Yanick Lahens, translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover, moves through the interconnected lives of Haitians contending with corruption, murder, and internecine intrigue. Told from multiple perspectives, set in Port-au-Prince, Lahens’s study of the Haitian capital does not shy away from a sense of its embedded difficulties. Exploring the ways in which violent crime holds immediate repercussions for the lives of everyone it touches, Sweet Undoings generates circumstances in which none of the novel’s protagonists can hide. Glover, the book’s translator, has also translated the prominent Francophone Caribbean authors Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Frankétienne, and René Depestre.

Time Come: Selected Prose (Picador) by Linton Kwesi Johnson assembles decades of the trailblazing poet’s prose writing, gathering speeches, articles, critical reviews, obituaries on fallen comrades, and more. An indispensable pillar of British Caribbean literature, Johnson’s poems define generations of thought, activism, and resistance. Time Come is a blueprint for the writer’s consciousness and politics, set against the backdrop of a United Kingdom in rocky self-determination. Writing through and against racism, xenophobia, and class warfare, Johnson’s prose is as engaged, laser-sharp, and relevant as his iconic poems. Time Come includes an introduction by globally renowned race theorist Paul Gilroy. 

The Mother Island (Self-Published) by Jacinth Howard the debut collection of poems from the Vincentian academic and researcher, explores the Caribbean woman’s psyche through writing steeped in nature, history, identity, and family. The book’s four sections — “Hurricane Season”, “Wenchcraft”, “Animal Tales and Outings”, and “Paradise” — position the speakers of these poems in direct or subliminal contact with quintessentially Caribbean forces of life, spirituality, and power. Drawing on ancestral ties to the islands that predate colonial settlement, The Mother Island frankly addresses systemic inequalities, the resonances of which are still felt in modern society. Howard will present the book at the 40th Marché de la Poésie, June 2023, in Paris. 

Suite as Sugar (Dundurn Press) by Camille Hernández-Ramdwar takes the reader through the thorny entanglements surrounding spaces between life and death, in short stories that traverse Toronto to Trinidad. Most of the stories in the debut collection take a subversive approach to discussing controversial topics, including vaccination statuses and academic doublespeak. Ancestors, too, play a pivotal role in Suite as Sugar, with elements of magical realism infusing the interactions between the living and their dearly departed. Making liberal use of Trinidadian English Creole, each story carries an underpinning of connectedness to ritual, place, and an overarching human purpose, particularly in desperate times.