The passion for gardening comes together with the passion for words in this anthology by writers who garden and gardeners who write. Among the contributors are Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinee rose, and Henri Cole with two poems. As well as the new, some old favourites are included.

My Favourite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love

KINCAID, Jamaica

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Jamaica Kincaid's new novel is narrated by a seventy-year old West Indian woman looking back on her life and evoking the relationships that have given it meaning. Her themes are sex, human relations, and the interplay of power and powerlessness - and how easy it is to fall from one into the other. Her story, which begins at the height of imperialism and ends in the twilight of colonialism, abounds in the vivid characters, strong situations and pyrotechnic writing that make Jamaica Kincaid one of our most compelling novelists.

The Autobiography of My Mother (Galley)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

New York, Farrar Strauss Giroux

Annie John

"Annie John "is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of "The Catcher in the Rye "and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "Kincaid's novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie's voice--urgent, demanding to be heard--is one that will not soon be forgotten by readers. An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, "It was in such a paradise that I lived." When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a "young lady," ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. "For I could not be sure," she reflects, "whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world."

Vintage Books

My Brother

Penguin Audio

Lucy

Contemporary

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid’s novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice—urgent, demanding to be heard—is one that will not soon be forgotten by readers. An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, “It was in such a paradise that I lived.” When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. “For I could not be sure,” she reflects, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world."

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

At the Bottom of the River

Jamaica Kincaid's inspired, lyrical short stories Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean--family, manners, and landscape--as distilled and transformed by Kincaid's special style and vision. Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things--a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings--shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place--these stories tell us something we didn't know, in a way we hadn't expected.

Narrated by an elderly West Indian woman looking back on her life, a story beginning at the height of imperialism and ending as colonialism fades deals with sex, human relations, and the interplay of power and powerlessness. By the author of Annie John. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

The Autobiography of My Mother

In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid―her first in ten years―a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters―a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England―as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, "the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then." Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling―creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

See Now Then: A Novel

Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple. She begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade at the same time that the mysteries of own sexuality begin to unravel. Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new heroine who is destined to win a place of honor in contemporary fiction.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KINCAID, Jamaica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by KINCAID, Jamaica

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KINCAID, Jamaica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

My Favourite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love

The Autobiography of My Mother (Galley)

Annie John

My Brother

Lucy

Annie John

At the Bottom of the River

The Autobiography of My Mother

See Now Then: A Novel

Lucy