Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...
Author
Publisher
Catapult
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Description
"The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women--immigrants or the descendants of immigrants--who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to...
4) Fire rush
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she goes raving with her friends, the "Tombstone Estate gyals," at The Crypt, an underground dub reggae club in their industrial town on the outskirts of London. Raised by her distant father after her mother's disappearance when she was a girl, Yamaye...
Author
Publisher
Cormorant Books Inc
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"Cyril Rowntree migrates to Toronto from Jamaica in 2012. Managing a precarious balance of work and university he begins to navigate his way through the implications of being racialized in his challenging new land. A chance encounter with a panhandler named Patricia leads Cyril to a suitcase full of photographs and letters dating back to the early 1920s. Cyril is drawn into the letters and their story of a white mother's struggle with the need to...
Author
Publisher
Rare Machines, an imprint of Dundurn Press
Pub. Date
2022
Language
English
Description
"A coming-of-age story about Jamaican Canadian identity, love, passion, chosen family and rediscovering life's pleasures after loss. After the mysterious death of her twin sister, Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is without her other half. Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends while embarking on an array of hilarious...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet writes a stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I. Deep-dyed in language both sensuous and biblical, Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions memorializes the experience of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The poem narrates the psychic and physical terrors of these young...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places . . . including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of...
9) Usain Bolt
Author
Publisher
Frances Lincoln Children's Books
Pub. Date
[2024]
Language
English
Description
"Growing up in a rural town in Jamaica, Usain was a standout cricketer and sprinter from a young age. His school coach noticed his talent, and by age fourteen he was wowing fans with his lightning speed on the track. Due to a medical condition named scolosis, it took Usain time to develop a training routine that worked for him, but by listening to his body and working with professionals, he learned his strengths and played to them. In 2008 he took...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"Centers on Abel and Vera Paisley, a working-class Jamaican couple striving to build a better life for their children. Abel travels to London in the early 1960s in search of fortune. Instead, he sees an opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life by faking his death and assuming a new identity. Vera, now a widow, is racked with guilt over her husband's "death" and takes out her grief on her children, Irene and Vincent. The effects of Abel's decision...
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
2024.
Language
English
Description
"Dominoes opens in London, twenty-nine days before the wedding of a young couple. Layla is a mixed-race woman -- with a Black, Jamaican mother, and a white father she's never met -- and Andy is a white man of Scottish descent. When they first meet at a party, they can't believe how instant their chemistry is, and how quickly their relationship unfolds. But the commonalities between the two outweigh their differences; funnily enough, they even share...
12) If I survive you
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains...
Author
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"In Search of Mary Seacole is a superb and revealing biography that explores her remarkable achievements and unique status as an icon of the 19th century, but also corrects some of the myths that have grown around her life and career. Having been raised in Jamaica and worked in Panama, Mary Seacole came to England in the 1850s and volunteered to help out during the Crimean War. When her services were turned down, she financed her own expedition to...
15) Small island
Publisher
PBS Distribution
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
Explores the lives of two couples, one Jamaican and the other English, whose worlds intertwine in post-World War II Britain, at a turning point in the long relationship between the two countries. It is a story of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers.
16) Patsy: a novel
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother--or even...
17) The Enigma game
Author
Publisher
Hyperion
Pub. Date
2020.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
A German soldier risks his life to drop off the sought-after Enigma Machine to British Intelligence, hiding it in a pub in a small town in northeast Scotland. Louisa Adair, a teen girl hired to look after the pub owner's elderly, German-born aunt, Jane Warner, finds it but doesn't report it. Flight-Lieutenant Jamie Beaufort-Stuart intercepts a signal but can't figure it out. Ellen McEwen, volunteer at the local airfield, acts as the go-between and...
Publisher
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
College-bound romantic Daniel Bae and Jamaica-born pragmatist Natasha Kingsley meet, and fall for each other, over one magical day amidst the fervor and flurry of New York City. Sparks immediately fly between these two strangers, who might never have met had fate not given them a little push. But will fate be enough to take these teens from star-crossed to lucky in love?
Author
Publisher
Verso
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman's family story 'Where are you from?' Hazel Carby was continually asked as a girl, at a time when being Black and being British was understood to be an impossibility. To answer that question properly, eminent scholar Hazel Carby finds she needs to trace not just the family history of her Jamaican father and her Welsh mother, but to untangle knots the British Empire created...
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