4 books from and about Antigua and Barbuda: what each is about, the plot, and a note from Professor Kogi.
A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid
Original language: English · Paperback · ISBN 978-0374527075
A Small Place is an extended essay by Jamaica Kincaid about Antigua, the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she was raised. Written in a direct, sometimes sardonic voice, the book addresses a visitor arriving on the island and gradually shifts from the surface beauty of the landscape to the political and social conditions underneath. Kincaid describes crumbling infrastructure, government corruption, and the lingering effects of British colonial rule on daily life in Antigua.
The essay moves between tones. At points it reads as sharp satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, turning a tourist's expectations inside out. At other points it becomes a personal account of what it means to grow up in a place shaped by outside powers and then to look back at it with adult eyes. Kincaid does not separate Antigua's present difficulties from its colonial history but treats them as connected.
The book is short, running under a hundred pages, yet it covers a wide arc: tourism, education, language, the local library, race, and the gap between how an island appears to visitors and how it is experienced by the people who live there.
Plot
Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up.
Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
Original language: English · Hardcover · ISBN 978-1784886837
Caribe is a cookbook that covers the food traditions of the Caribbean as a whole region rather than focusing on a single island or country. Written by food writer and chef Keshia Sakarah, the book is the result of years of travel across the islands and collaboration with historians. Each chapter connects recipes to the specific histories of the places they come from, including the colonial past, migration, and cultural exchange that shaped what people eat today.
The recipes span breakfast through dinner and include dishes tied to particular national stories. Soup Joumou appears alongside the history of Haitian independence. Dominican Saltfish Accra Fritters, Guyanese Pepperpot, and Montserratian Fish Broth each carry their own context, with many recipes passed through generations within families and communities. Sakarah pairs these with essays and location photography from across the Caribbean.
The book treats difficult aspects of the region's past with directness rather than avoiding them. Slavery, colonialism, and forced displacement all figure into how Caribbean cuisines developed, and Sakarah addresses these connections alongside the recipes. The scope extends across multiple nations, languages, and island groups, reflecting how varied the Caribbean actually is.
Plot
Through years-long research including collaborations with historians and extensive travel to the islands, food writer and chef Keshia Sakarah explores the complicated and varied stories of each nation through its beloved dishes, addressing difficult truths while at the same time creating a joyful collection of the most celebrated recipes in the region to pay homage to those who created them, from Haitian Independence – Soup Joumou and Dominican Saltfish Accra Fritters, to Guyanese Pepperpot and Montserratian Fish Broth, passed on through generations.
Including stunning location photography, essays and recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between, Caribe is the ultimate tome of Caribbean cooking.
Original language: English · Paperback · ISBN 978-1894663984
Ladies of the Night is a short story collection by Althea Prince, set in two places: Toronto in Canada and Antigua in the Caribbean. The stories center on Black women and their experiences of love, family bonds, grief, and the search for identity. Each setting frames a different side of women's daily and emotional lives. The Toronto pieces look at pressures inside intimate and family relationships in that city.
The characters manage struggle, loss, anger, love, and plain joy in varied and sometimes contrasting ways. Some stories take dark or unsettling turns; others are lighter and openly funny. Prince moves between tones instead of holding one mood across the whole book, letting sadness and laughter sit close together. The result is a wide range of situations rather than one repeated pattern.
The Antiguan stories draw on Prince's insight into relationships, which also appears in her novel and essays. Antigua and Barbuda is a small island state in the eastern Caribbean, and Toronto holds one of the largest Caribbean communities outside the region, so the two settings sit at either end of a well-travelled migration route.
Plot
Ladies of the Night is set in Toronto and Antigua. With women's loves and lives as their focus, the stories contain dramatic twists and turns: some humorous, others shocking and disturbing, all leaving a haunting melody behind. The Toronto stories capture the issues women face as they walk the ground of intimate and family relationships in that city. The Antiguan setting of some of the stories are reflective of Prince's insight into relationships, captured in her novel and essays. The characters reveal their different ways of managing a range of struggle, pain, rage, love and pure unadulterated joy. The humour of some stories complement the plaintive sadness and emotionality of the strings some other stories pluck.
Original language: English · Paperback · ISBN 978-1250322425
Lucy is a novel by Jamaica Kincaid about a young woman from the West Indies who moves to North America to work as an au pair. She lives with Lewis and Mariah, a wealthy couple with four children, in what appears to be a comfortable and enviable household. From her first days in the job, Lucy observes the family with sharp attention, noticing fractures beneath the surface of their polished life together.
The book follows Lucy as she measures the world she has entered against the one she left behind. She carries memories of her upbringing in the Caribbean, and these memories color the way she reads her employers' habits, assumptions, and blind spots. Kincaid, who grew up in Antigua, draws on the distance between Caribbean and North American life without reducing either place to a simple contrast. Lucy is direct and unyielding in her observations, unwilling to accept easy versions of the truth about her hosts or about herself.
Much of the novel's tension comes from the gap between how Lewis and Mariah understand their own lives and how Lucy perceives them. Questions of class, displacement, and self-knowledge run through the story, grounded in small domestic details rather than large dramatic events.
Plot
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple--handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.
Books from Antigua and Barbuda
