Toppa Top 10: Ten Great Books By Caribbean Authors In 2015

By Dimitry Elias Léger

Read our interview with Dimitry Elias Léger here.

It’s a good time to be a writer from the Caribbean. Major publishers and critics used to select only one writer from the region every couple of generations and have that guy, they were mostly guys, speak for all of us, pretending there weren’t other writers with other takes on life in and around our watery region. Worst, Caribbean writers were placed in silos according to their language and rarely crossed over. Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon were the only widely read writers from the French Caribbean for decades. Similarly, Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier and Barbados’s George Lamming were standard bearers for Spanish and English Caribbean literature respectively. The same way the world was slow to check out other Caribbean singers besides Bob Marley, Caribbean writers, other than the first stars and Trinidad’s V.S. Naipaul, struggled to emerge.

Today, thanks to various forces, most notably the explosive growth in number of creative writing programs, and literature in general in America since 1990, the literary grandchildren of those pioneering Caribbean writers are emerging in greater numbers, and with a range of voices. Readers can find classically tragic Caribbean novels. They can also find classically ribald ones. And they can also find perfectly funny-sad Caribbean stories across genres too, with young adult, poetry, and science fiction joining literary fiction with settings and accents that hopscotch across islands, America and Europe, in creolized English, French, and Spanish. Best of all, book lovers can now meet an equal number of women and men writers with authoritative voices about the human condition and la vida loca caribeño.

There’s more work to be done. American and English publishers still don’t translate enough of the Haitian and non-English-writing Caribbean writers who put out significant and steady books. The French and Spanish and other international publishers have the reverse problem. They’re far behind America in embracing the new stars of the 21st century Caribbean canon.

Scroll through for the Caribbean laureates of 2015.

Tiphanie Yanique Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead, 2015)

With her first novel Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead, 2015), Tiphanie Yanique, who was born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, offers a rare window into the political and historical underbelly of the sprawling but definitely not virginal Virgin Islands. Pulsing with sex and other messiness, the novel builds well on her debut story collection How To Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories (Graywolf Press, 2010.)

Colin Channer Providential (Akashic)

Jamaica’s Colin Channer has been mixing patois in his romantic tales since his 1998 debut novel, Waiting In Vain. In 2015, he blessed us with Providential (Akashic), a poetry collection that touches on the full range of Jamaican languages and dreams.

Raphael Confiant, Madame St-Clair: Reine of Harlem

In Madame St-Clair: Reine of Harlem (Mercure de France), veteran Martiniquan novelist Raphael Confiant spins a gripping and fascinating story based on the little-known life of Madame St. Clair, a Martiniquan immigrant to Harlem who rose to become a top boss in the Mafia at the height of Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age of the roaring ‘20s. This book’s still only available in French.

Chantel Acevedo, The Distant Marvels (Europa Editions, 2015)

A Miami native born to Cuban parents, Chantel Acevedo specializes in novels that give wonderful tours of Cuban history and its fraught relationships with Spain and other neighbors and cultures. Her latest novel, The Distant Marvels (Europa Editions, 2015), is, yes, a marvelous visit to a forgotten corner of Cuban history that illuminates so much of today.

Edwidge Danticat, Untwine (Scholasic Press, 2015)

Haiti’s Edwidge Danticat has been a star of global letters since the world, and especially Oprah’s Book Club, fell hard for her debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (Soho Press) in 1994. No matter how old you are, to read the first sentence of Untwine (Scholasic Press, 2015), which is a young adult novel about twin sisters undergoing a painful separation, is to fall under Danticat’s spell, as her prose is as powerful today as it was 20 years ago.

Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 2015)


Shadowshaper (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 2015) is the second highly entertaining novel published by Daniel José Older in 2015. Of Cuban origin, and adept at writing convincingly for young adults and adults about this world and other worlds, Older can also brag about having the most beautiful book cover of the year.

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.

Makenzy Orcel, La Nuit des Terraces (Editions La Contre Allee)

Haitian poet Makenzy Orcel writes wondrous book-length poems in French and has only been published by French publishers. La Nuit des Terraces (Editions La Contre Allee), his second moody yet loving book about Port-au-Prince nightlife, will kill whenever it comes out in English and other languages.

Dimitry Léger God Loves Haiti (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015)

Born and raised in Haiti, my debut novel, God Loves Haiti (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2015) is about a temperamental Catholic artist and the men who love her too much in Port-au-Prince after a devastating earthquake. Its humorous depiction of the not-so-glamorous life of a Haitian President won fans and criticism in Haiti. Everyone, however, dug the title.

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead)

Honorable mention: Even though Marlon James’s third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead) was published at the end of 2014 and not in 2015, this wild trip through the Jamaican underworld at the height of Bob Marley’s fame won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the process, James became the first Caribbean writer to win one of the world’s most prestigious awards since Junot Diaz, of the Dominican Republic, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead).