Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin, 2015)
Fresh out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Harvard of American literature, Naomi Jackson was born in Brooklyn to parents from Barbados and Antigua, and in her sensitive debut novel The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin, 2015), she does justice, in a lovely coming of age story of two sisters, to the ambivalent feelings Caribbean diaspora can have with their mother- (and father-) lands.