How to Say Babylon (Simon & Schuster), the debut memoir by Safiya Sinclair, winner of the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, is a tempestuous reckoning with the author’s Rastafari upbringing beneath the yoke of a didactic patriarch. Sinclair juxtaposes the natural beauty of her girlhood’s Jamaican landscape with the strict, often punitive edicts issued by her father to the rest of her family. Plotting a course for autonomy, the author charts a journey of resistance through fear, championing self-determination despite pain and sacrifice.

The Box (Graywolf Press) by Bermudian Mandy-Suzanne Wong employs experimental storytelling to underpin larger notions of bodily autonomy and freedom in a heavily conscribed world. The novel’s plot hinges on a seemingly impenetrable box which falls into the hands of a chronic hermit, thereupon passed among a series of personages who will be affected by this mysterious object in multiple ways. Wong’s curiosity as an archivist is on display, as her narrative exposes the origins of why we tell tales.

A Stranger in the Citadel (Tachyon Publications) by Grenada-raised Tobias Buckell presents a compassionate allegory for humanity’s peaceful coexistence and survival, through the lens of speculative fiction. Focusing on the thorny relationship between a warrioress who has never seen a book, and a fugitive librarian fleeing dangerous reprisals, A Stranger in the Citadel is awash with political intrigue, often highlighting the fundamental breakdown between official pronouncements and the lives of the working-class people that superpowers are meant to serve.

Pay As You Go (McSweeney’s), the debut novel by Trinidad-born Eskor David Johnson, propels a protagonist with a shifty past through the fictional city of Polis, chronicling his survival through witty and often madcap stratagems. Pay As You Go contemplates the possibilities of abundant aliveness in desperate circumstances, fuelled by Johnson’s urbane and reflective approach to narrative prose. As Slide, the book’s antihero, shows the reader in frequently hilarious turns, no home exists but the one we make for ourselves.

Cowboy (Cheerio Publishing), the debut poetry collection by Kandace Siobhan Walker, contains references to the writer’s Canadian, Jamaican, Gullah-Geechee, and Welsh heritages. Exploring place and identity through radical viewpoints, Walker’s poems are electrifying witnesses to a tumultuous coming of age. Navigating the often-deleterious effects of internet culture against the shifting certainties of locations, Cowboy is both meditative and confrontational in its addresses, demanding attention from the reader that focuses on the singular question: where and how is a person made?