Mapped
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
Marlon James's many-voiced novel turns on the 1976 attempt on the life of the reggae singer Bob Marley, the Singer, two days before a peace concert, and the political gang warfare of Kingston that lies behind it. The real city is its ground: the Singer's house on Hope Road where the gunmen strike, the ghetto garrisons of West Kingston tied to the rival parties, and the concert in the park; the story later follows the dons and their trade north to New York.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
Rhys writes the Caribbean back into Jane Eyre, giving the first wife her own island childhood. The anchor is Jamaica, where the creole heiress Antoinette grows up at the ruined Coulibri estate near Spanish Town after emancipation; the story then crosses to a honeymoon house on Dominica, Rhys's own birthplace, and ends far away in an English attic. It brings Jamaica, and the wider West Indies, into the atlas.
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