Abeni’s Song (Macmillan) is the first in an epic adventure-fantasy series for readers aged eight to twelve, by American-Trinidadian novelist P. Djèlí Clark. Young Abeni is thrust into an unplanned-for magical apprenticeship which she resents but cannot avoid, if she is to secure the future of her besieged fellow villagers. During her tutelage, a cohort of spirit guides assist her on an often perilous journey, one in which the fates of multiple forces are intertwined. The second installment of Abeni’s saga releases in 2024.

Elektrik: Caribbean Writing, An Anthology of Eight Female Writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe (Two Lines Press) commits itself to the vision of representing underheard voices from the Francophone Caribbean world. Assembling the creative writing of eight women authors — Gaël Octavia, Fabienne Kanor, Marie-Célie Agnant, Kettly Mars, Suzanne Dracius, Mireille Jean-Gilles, Adlyne Bonhomme, and Gerty Dambury — Elektrik repositions urgently needed focus on the interlocking intensities, passions, and visions of women’s lives from the French Caribbean.

We Are the Crisis (Blackstone Publishing), the sequel to US Virgin Islander Cadwell Turnbull’s speculative thriller No Gods, No Monsters, catapults readers back into the heart of the action created by an emergence of mythological creatures into human society. Following the grisly events labelled “The Monster Massacre”, political factions are drawn between those on either side of the human-monster divide. In the background of this tumult, ancient forces conjure a reckoning promising to reveal magical underpinnings that govern life itself.

All Made of Longing (Bamboo Talk Press), the debut poetry collection by Guyanese singer-songwriter and musician Ruth Osman, presents a broad swathe of human emotion, perceived through a feminist, womanist, and sensualist lens. Osman’s poems contain an innate lyrical quality, when speaking of both romantic and familial love. A similar richness is employed when the poet reflects on complex notions of identity and purpose. The poems invite welcome contemplations on the role of Caribbean artists to represent their lived realities.

US-based Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s third collection, School of Instructions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), began as a commission investigating the experiences of West Indian soldiers during the First World War. The book developed this research into a wide-ranging meditation that encompasses boyhood, martial rule, civil unrest, and coming of age in perilous eras. Hutchinson’s methodological approach to creating and shaping a poem is on display here, with his usual fine-tuned microcosmic techniques of drawing meaning from even the tiniest of everyday details.