Force Ripe

This remarkable new dictionary represents the first attempt in some four centuries to record the state of development of English as used across the entire Caribbean region.

A touching portrayal of a little girls story, beautifully woven into a work of fiction, through her eyes and in her own lyrical Creole voice. Force Ripe is not just another damaged childhood story, but one that depicts an exciting and important part of a Caribbean island's colourful history.

Set on a West Indian Island, Force Ripe portrays the story of Lee, a little girl growing up in a northern village in the 1970s, when it was normal for children to be left with grandparents while parents went abroad to work and send money home. It was the time of revolution, during which Lee's father joined a growing Rastafarian movement. Force Ripe tells, in Lee's voice, the story of her life in the ghetto with her brother and father, when the siblings were taken out of school and left on their own to roam the bushes and smoke ganja. It describes how she was taken by a Rastman when she was just ten, and how she survived - with no one to turn to - during a time of women's liberation, free education and youth movements. She is subsequently rescued when the Rastafarian commune is disbanded by the People's Revolutionary Army-(PRA), and struggles to bury her secret past.

Blackgirl on Mars is a radical memoir that chronicles author, educator and activist Lesley-Ann Brown's two years' worth of travel searching for "home". As she travels across the US during the Black Lives Matter protests and Covid-19 pandemic and then to Trinidad and Tobago to attend the funeral of her grandmother, Brown tells her own life-story, as well as writing about race, gender, sexuality, and education, and ideas of home, family and healing. Both a radical political manifesto and a moving memoir about finding your place in the world, Blackgirl on Mars is about what it means to be a Black and Indigenous woman in Europe and the Americas in the twenty-first century.