First published 2025
Six-year-old Fidel lives surrounded by the everyday wonders of Guadeloupe: sugar cane fields, dusty roads, and the complex web of neighbors who love and resent each other in equal measure. His small world expands dramatically when the gadèt-zafè arrives to warn his mother of her impending death. Violence shatters his childhood, leaving him orphaned and sent to his mother's homeland of Dominica. There he moves between relatives who view him with vastly different eyes. Some grandmothers embrace him with fierce love while one aunt wishes him dead. At Catholic school he learns orthodox prayers, but his grandfather teaches him Obeah wisdom. Spirits of the dead visit regularly, offering counsel, making threats, providing answers to questions he barely knows how to ask. As Fidel grows, he discovers his family's buried secrets and navigates the tensions between indigenous traditions and colonial influences. The violence he witnessed follows him, living not just in strangers but within himself. When a chance for happiness appears in distant Canada, Fidel faces an agonizing choice between his deep, complicated love for his Caribbean home and the promise of a different life.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, coming-of-age, magical-realism, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, emotionally-complex, haunting, introspective, lyrical, meditative
Tropes: coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water, found-family, internal-conflict, magical-realism
Setting: Guadeloupe, Dominica, Canada, Caribbean
Period: 20th-century
321 pages · Paperback · Kensington
Content warnings: child-abuse, colonialism, death, violence