June is Caribbean American heritage month

"A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born. In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling...

"Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls--more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen's upbringing too. Durka is more than a...

"A literature professor tries to rediscover who she is after the sudden death of her husband, even as a series of family and political jolts force her to ask what we owe those in crisis in our families, biological or otherwise"-- Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then...

What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips...

Abel and Vera Paisley are 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 reverberate...

Presents a romantic, mesmerizing story of first love and second chances, all to the tunes of sweet soca music. Reyna has spent most of her life at her family's seaside resort in Tobago, the Plumeria. It's been two years since Reyna's mother passed away, two years since Aiden- her childhood best friend, first kiss, first love, first everything- left the island to pursue his music dreams. Even Daddy seems to want to move on, leaving her to try to keep...

"Trinidad in the 1940s, nearing the end of American occupation and British colonialism. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognizable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building ... divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops--Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, all three born of the barracks....

""These wonderful poems open a world of sensation and memory. But it is a world revealed by language, never just controlled. The voice that guides the action here is openhearted and open-minded-a lyric presence that never deserts the subject or the reader. Syntax, craft and cadence add to the gathering music from poem to poem with-to use a beautiful phrase from the book, 'each note tethering sound to meaning.'"-Eavan Boland Haunting, alarming, transformative,...

12-year-old Jamaican boy, Lloyd, is searching for his beloved grandfather, a fisherman who is lost at sea. Lloyd suspects that his grandfather has witnessed an illegal capture of dolphins for the tourist trade and that he has come to harm. Interspersed with Lloyd's quest on land and sea is a second voice -- of the grandfather himself. Marooned on a rock, he describes his life growing up in a rural fishing village in a long-gone era.

Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the so-called easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there--a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand. Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this...