The Autobiography of My Mother

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal comes an unforgettable novel of one womans courageous coming of age. Powerful, disturbing, and stirring, Jamaica Kincaids novel is the deeply charged story of a womans life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Jamaica Kincaid takes us from Xuelas childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack La Batte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuelas intensely physical world is redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road. It seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, and her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is the black room of the world that is Xuelas barrenness and life without a mother. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one womans inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.