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Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines the complexities of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and explores the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change through their own actions. The dramatic climax and tragic choices made grow from the gulf of incomprehension between middle-class and poor Jamaicans and provide penetrating insights into the roots of violence in impoverished communities.
It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital.Sorrel can take no more and she persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals, bitter enemies of the Domins, who have found ways of surviving in the hills, but she also knows they will have to evade the packs of ferals, animals with a taste for human flesh. Not least she knows that the sun will kill them if they can't find shelter.Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.
From award-winning Jamaican author Diana McCaulay, Gone to Drift is a powerful voice-driven middle grade novel about family set in Jamaica. Lloyd comes from a long line of fishermen. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Lloyd feels most at home with the sea and his grandfather, Maas Conrad, at his side. When his grandfather doesn’t return from a fishing trip, Lloyd fears he has gone to drift. The sea may be in Lloyd’s blood, but as he searches for his grandfather, he discovers a side of the ocean—and the people who use it—that he’s never known before. Told in the alternating voices of Lloyd and Maas Conrad, Gone to Drift is a moving story of family, courage, and the wonders of the oceans we call home.
Karen Vincent is eleven when her mother leaves home, her father begins visiting her room late at night and she realizes her family has deeply buried secrets. Set on the beaches and in the nightclubs of Jamaica, White Liver Gal is a coming of age story about a young woman's sexual power and the risks she faces in using it . When Karen tries to escape her fractured family as a teenager, she goes to live with her older married lover believing that it is better to be a mistress than a wife. White Liver Gal is also a story about the strength of friendship between women. Karen's best friend, Angie, supports her through a series of devastating losses until their relationship is destroyed by a shocking act of betrayal. Fast paced and sensual, White Liver Gal explores what it means to be a young woman both defined by her sexuality and rejected for embracing that sexuality. As Karen begins to uncover the dark secrets of her own family, she faces the limits of her sexual power and learns about the redemptive possibilities of the powerful bonds between women.
Following her parent's divorce, 15 year-old Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York. After her mother's death, 15 years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. A white Jamaican in a black Jamaica, she struggles to come to terms with her family's part in the slave trade.
Jamaica used to be the source of much of Britain's wealth, an island where slaves grew sugar and the money flowed in vast quantities. It was a tropical paradise for the planters, a Babylonian exile for the Africans shipped to the Caribbean. It became independent in 1962. Jamaica is now a country in despair. It has become a cockpit of gang warfare, drug crime and poverty. Haunted by the legacy of imperialism, its social and racial divisions seem entrenched. Its extraordinary musical tradition and physical beauty are shadowed by casual murder, police brutality and political corruption. Ian Thomson shows a side of Jamaica that tourists rarely see in their gated enclaves. He travelled country ro...
What happens in the woods, stays in the woods. . . Carey is keeping a terrible secret. If she tells, it could destroy her future. If she doesn't, will she ever be free? For almost as long as she can remember, Carey has lived in a camper van in the heart of the woods with her drug-addicted mother and six-year-old sister, Jenessa. Her mother routinely disappears for weeks at a time, leaving the girls to cope alone. Survival is Carey's only priority - until strangers arrive and everything changes . . . Jenny Downham, author of BEFORE I DIE, says that IF YOU FIND ME is "a beautiful book about survival, identity, family, love and so much more."
'Every word he's written about me is a lie including "and" and "the"...' For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine 'Miss Kathie' Kenton, a star of the wattage of Elizabeth Taylor and the emotional torments of Judy Garland. The survivor of multiple marriages, career comebacks and cosmetic surgeries, Miss Kathie lives the way legends should. But danger lurks when gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III arrives and worms his way into Miss Kathie's heart and boudoir. Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written his celebrity tell-all memoir and that it foretells her death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman-penned World War II musical extravaganza Unconditional Surrender, in which Miss Kathie portrays Lily defeating Japanese forces from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans - and for posterity...
Leah Jackson - in detention. Then armed Year 9s burst in, shooting. She escapes, just. But the new Lock Down system for keeping intruders out is now locking everyone in. She takes to the ceilings and air vents with another student, Anton, and manages to use her mobile to call out to the world. First: survive the gang - the so-called 'Eternal Knights'. Second: rescue other kids taken hostage, and one urgently needing medical help. Outside, parents gather, the army want intelligence, television cameras roll, psychologists give opinions, sociologists rationalise, doctors advise - and they all want a piece of Leah. Soon her phone battery is running out; the SAS want her to reconnoitre the hostage area ... But she is guarding a terrifying conviction. Her brother, Connor, is at the centre of this horror. Is he with the Eternal Knights or just a pawn? She remembers. All those times Connor reached out for help ... If she'd listened, voiced her fears about him earlier, would things be different now? Should she give up her brother? With only Anton for company, surviving by wits alone, Leah wrestles with the terrible choices ...
Daniel is raised as an invalid in isolation by his mother until the day she is removed to an asylum and Daniel is taken to live with the doctor's family. Soon Daniel begins to uncover secrets about his mother's dark family history, and a sinister doll seems to be at the centre of the mystery. First person recount. Suggested level: intermediate, secondary.