Golden Child 
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Wide Sargasso Sea 
Don’t Stop the Carnival
Love After Love
Another Sun
Black RockA tense thriller of child abduction set in LONDON
Ten Great Books set in THE CARIBBEAN
21st April 2023
The Caribbean is the latest place for us to visit in our ‘Great books set in…’ series. Ten great books set in The Caribbean.
‘Nowhere else is it possible to experience, in such a small area, so many different cultures and social conditions, such diverse vegetation, and such varied landscape as in the Caribbean‘ – Leonard Adkins
‘There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner‘ – Hunter S. Thompson
Here are ten books to read that will immerse you in The Caribbean, on different islands and all with very different characters and stories to tell….
Golden Child by Claire Adam – TRINIDAD & TOBAGO
Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life.
Clyde, the father, works long, exhausting shifts at the petroleum plant in southern Trinidad; Joy, his wife, looks after the home. Their two sons, thirteen years old, wake early every morning to travel to the capital, Port of Spain, for school. They are twins but nothing alike: Paul has always been considered odd, while Peter is widely believed to be a genius, destined for greatness.
When Paul goes walking in the bush one afternoon and doesn’t come home, Clyde is forced to go looking for him, this child who has caused him endless trouble already, and whom he has never really understood. And as the hours turn to days, and Clyde begins to understand Paul’s fate, his world shatters – leaving him faced with a decision no parent should ever have to make.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James – JAMAICA
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015
JAMAICA, 1976
Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught.
From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a dazzling display of masterful storytelling exploring this near-mythic event. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists, and even the CIA. Gripping and inventive, ambitious and mesmerising, A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of the most remarkable and extraordinary novels of the twenty-first century.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys – DOMINICA & JAMAICA
A prequel to Jane Eyre, telling the story of the Creole heiress Antoinette, the “mad woman in the attic”.
Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is inexorably driven towards madness, and her husband into the arms of another novel’s heroine. This classic study of betrayal, a seminal work of postcolonial literature, is Jean Rhys’s brief, beautiful masterpiece.
Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk – BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
It’s everyone’s dream: to leave behind the rat-race of the working world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colours, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.
This is the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle age, runs away to a Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk, who himself lived on an island in the sun for seven years, draws on his own experiences to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving about a man’s search for happiness, and for himself.
Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud – TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
Meet the Ramdin-Chetan family: forged through loneliness, broken by secrets, saved by love.
Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household, happy in their differences, as they build a home together. Home: the place where your navel string is buried, keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world. Happy and loving they are, until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart.
Brave and brilliant, steeped in affection, Love After Love asks us to consider what happens at the very brink of human forgiveness, and offers hope to anyone who has loved and lost and has yet to find their way back.
Island on the Edge of the World by Deborah Rodriguez – PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI
Haiti. A poor country rich in courage, strength and love. As these four women are about to discover.
Charlie, the rootless daughter of American missionaries, now working as a hairdresser in Northern California. But the repercussions of a traumatic childhood far from home have left her struggling for her way in life.
Bea, Charlie’s eccentric grandmother, who is convinced a reunion with her estranged mother will help Charlie heal.
Lizbeth, a Texas widow who has never strayed too far from home. She is on a daunting journey into the unknown, searching for the grandchild she never knew existed.
And Senzey, a young Haitian mother dealing with a lifetime of love and loss, who shows them the true meaning of bravery.
Together they venture through the teeming, colorful streets of Port-au-Prince, into the worlds of do-gooders doing more harm than good, Vodou practitioners, artists, activists, and everyday Haitian men and women determined to survive against all odds.
For Charlie, Bea, Lizbeth and Senzey, life will never be the same again…
Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton – HAVANA, CUBA
Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba’s high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country’s growing political unrest – until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary… Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa’s last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth…
River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer – THE CARIBBEAN
We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips.
Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations. The faces Rachel cannot forget. It’s 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear. With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea. Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home.
Another Sun by Timothy Williams – GUADELOUPE
On a plantation in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a man’s body is found in a pond, riddled with bullets. The victim is Monsieur Calais, a wealthy land-owner; within 24 hours, a suspect is arrested. Anne Marie Laveaud, a French-born judge who has recently been transferred to Guadeloupe, is called in to make a ruling. With a keen sense of compassion for the accused, she must navigate the world of Caribbean justice – very different from what she was used to in France – to confirm her suspicion that all is not as it seems
Black Rock by Amanda Smyth – TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
Celia’s mother died bringing her into the world – when one soul flies in, another flies out, her aunt Tassi says. So she lives in Black Rock, Tobago, with her cousins and Tassi’s second husband Roman, a man so sly he could crawl under a snake’s belly on stilts. Celia thinks he’s the devil, so when he does something that proves her right, she runs away to Trinidad and a new life in service.
We hope this has given you a taste for books with a Caribbean setting. Take a look at our database for more than 190 titles set here, and please feel free to add more!
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+1 for VS Naipaul
Also I would nominate “The Violins of St Jacques,” the only novel authored by the nonfiction travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor
where are the novels of the immortal VS Naipaul here? Guerillas, for example, or A House for Mr Biswas?
1 Comment
Thanks for this. I agree we could well have included ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, and apologise that we did not (it really is very hard to select). The book is in our data base but ‘Guerillas’ is not. This is because ‘Guerillas’ is set on an ‘unnamed island’ which does not really fit into the TripFiction remit of covering actual locations that people can visit.