From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua.

“If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him–why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen …”

So begins Jamaica Kincaid’s expansive essay, which 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.

Jamaica Kincaid presents a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua.

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence at the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, “It was in such a paradise that I lived.” When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a “young lady,” ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary.

At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. “For I could not be sure,” she reflects, “whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.”

A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Annie John focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie’s voice–urgent, demanding to be heard–is one that will not soon be forgotten.

This collection is Jamaica Kincaid’s earliest published writings: her inspired, lyrical short stories.

These stories plunge the listener gently into another way of perceiving both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her narrative is, by turns, naively whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partially remembered, partly divined. The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean–family, manners, and landscape–as distilled and transformed by Kincaid’s special style and vision.

Kincaid leads us to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child, the beauty and destructiveness of nature, the gulf between the masculine and the feminine, the significance of such familiar things as a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings–shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place–these stories tell us something we didn’t know, in a way we hadn’t expected.

The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid’s most admired creations

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.

At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis’s and Mariah’s lives, she is also unraveling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character possessed with adamantine clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity–a captivating heroine for our time.

A great writer’s lush, panoramic novel: the story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home.

Jamaica Kincaid’s first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.

Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of this island and of Mr. Potter’s days. As the narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid strings together a moving picture of Mr. Potter’s ancestors–beginning with memories of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide–and the outside world that presses in on his life, in the form of his Lebanese employer and, later, a couple fleeing World War II. Within these surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters–one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.

In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.

In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid–her first in ten years–a marriage is revealed in all it’s joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters, a Mother and Father, their two children living in a small village in New England, as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future–for, as she writes, “the present will be a now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Since the publication of her first short story collection, At The Bottom Of The River, nominated for a PEN / Faulkner Award for fiction, Jamaica Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In SEE NOW THEN, she envelops the listener in a world that is both familiar and startling–creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal comes an unforgettable novel of one woman’s courageous coming of age.

Powerful, disturbing, and stirring, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel is the deeply charged story of a woman’s 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 Xuela’s 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. Xuela’s 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 Xuela’s 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 woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.