Three Novels: A Reading

Curdella Forbes is the author of Songs of Silence; Flying with Icarus and Other Stories, a collection of stories for younger readers; A Permanent Freedom and Ghosts; and an award-winning scholarly work, From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender. She is currently Professor of Caribbean Literature at Howard University. Her most recent novel, A Tall History of Sugar (Akashic Books), was named one of Publishers Weekly's Big Literary Fiction Books of BookExpo 2019. A Tall History of Sugar tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a man who was "born without skin," so that no one is able to tell what race he belongs to; and Arrienne Christie, his quixotic soul mate who makes it her duty in life to protect Moshe from the social and emotional consequences of his strange appearance. The narrative begins with Moshe's birth in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica's independence from colonial rule, and ends in the era of Brexit and Donald Trump. The historical trajectory layers but never overwhelms the scintillating love story as the pair fight to establish their own view of loving, against the moral force of the colonial "plantation" and its legacies that continue to affect their lives and the lives of those around them. Written in lyrical, luminous prose that spans the range of Jamaican Englishes, this remarkable story follows the couple's mysterious love affair from childhood to adulthood, from the haunted environs of rural Jamaica to the city of Kingston, and then to England--another haunted locale in Forbes's rendition.

Monique Truong is the author of the novels The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Truong identifies herself as a former refugee, essayist, avid eater, lyricist/librettist, and intellectual property attorney — in that order, she notes. Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits (Viking) is an ingenious retelling in novel form of the many lives of Greek-Irish globetrotting writer Lafcadio Hearn, through the voices of the women who knew him best, and who, in telling his story, testify to their own remarkable journeys. A Greek woman talks about escaping her father’s house, marrying an Irish officer in the British Army, coming to Ireland with her two-year-old son, only to be forced to leave without him soon after. An African-American woman, born into slavery, makes her way to Cincinnati after the Civil War to work as a boarding house cook, where she meets and marries an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, a former samurai's daughter is introduced to a newly arrived English teacher, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator. Hearn is best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. Each woman is a gifted storyteller, and their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also their own luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. In a starred review Publishers Weekly called The Sweetest Fruits "[A] remarkable novel about love, the power of memory, and betrayal . . . Truong […] inhabits each of these three women brilliantly. [Her] command of voice and historical knowledge brings the stories of these remarkable women to life."

Sara Collins studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a Master of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. The Washington Post writes of her novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Harper), “A startling, compelling historical debut novel. . . should be on top of your vacation reading pile.”  All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being tried at the Old Bailey. The testimonies against Frannie are damning. She is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, a whore. But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even if remembering could save her life. She doesn’t know how she came to be covered in the victims’ blood. But she does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who stretched all bounds of ethics, and the events that brought her into the Benhams’ London home—and into a passionate and forbidden relationship. A brilliant, searing depiction of race, class, and oppression that penetrates the skin and sears the soul, it is the story of a woman of her own making in a world that would see her unmade.