Kisdadee Girl

Powerful forces surge through British Guiana as it transforms into independent Guyana. Margaret must navigate her own independence. Scottish, Portuguese, African: all and none of these, this teenager of the emergent Caribbean learns seduction Hollywood-style, but she belongs to more than a century of transgressions. She kisses forbidden faces, the living colours of colonial history. Love and loss come home to her in two men of the river.;When Margaret is just fifteen, her father dies. A little later, she packs up her dreams, leaves her riverman and makes the Atlantic crossing. But the spirits of her old geography keep whispering.

WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women, is devoted to nurturing the creativity of contemporary Caribbean women writers and artists, to providing a forum that amplifies their voices, and preserves their work for future audiences. This new issue, Volume 8/2016, is especially themed, ""Letters to the Granddaughtes: Conjuring the Caribbean Women Writers of the Future."" New work by 27 writers and artists are collected in this new issue, including internationally recognized authors and painters, and some new voices as well. Their works are about love, pain, survival, migration, loss, justice, hope, resistance, transformation, truth-telling, and the importance of remembering and recording the stories of our lives so that the granddaughters, i.e., the coming generations of Caribbean women writers and artists, can take us with them into the future.

She dreamed of finding a new life… Georgetown, Guyana 1970. Seven-year-old Rita has always known she was responsible for the death of her beautiful mother Cassie. Her absent-minded father allows her to run wild in her ramshackle white wooden house by the sea, and surrounded by her army of stray pets, most of the time she can banish her mother’s death to the back of her mind. But then her new stepmother Chandra arrives and the house empties of love and laughter. Rita’s pets are removed, her freedom curtailed, and before long, there’s a new baby sister on the way. There’s no room for Rita anymore. Desperate to fill up the emptiness inside her, Rita begins to talk to the only photo she has of her dead mother, a poor farmer’s daughter from the remote Guyanese rainforest. Determined to find the truth about her mother, Rita travels to find her mother’s family in an unfamiliar land of shimmering creeks and towering vines. She finds comfort in the loving arms of her grandmother among the flowering shrubs and trees groaning with fruit. But when she discovers the terrible bruising secret that her father kept hidden from her, will she ever be able to feel happiness again? A beautiful and inspiring story that will steal your heart and open your eyes. Fans of The Secret Life of Bees, The Vanishing Half and The Other Half of Augusta Hope will be captivated by The Far Away Girl. A beautiful and inspiring story that will steal your heart and open your eyes. Fans of The Secret Life of Bees, The Vanishing Half and The Other Half of Augusta Hope will be captivated by The Far Away Girl. What everyone is saying about The Far Away Girl: ‘Astoundingly beautiful, incredibly powerful, a powerhouse of a book. This author never ceases to amaze – book after book she stuns and beguiles with her beautiful prose and her wonderful stories… one of the most versatile writers I've read… This book is sheer perfection. Please read it. If you don't you're missing out.’ Renita D’Silva, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘An emotional, heart-warming, inspiring and absorbing story… totally unputdownable.’ My Reading Narnia, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘I devoured this book in just a couple of days… brilliant storytelling, this book is sure to be a hit and has certainly become a firm favourite of mine.’ Jenny W Reads ‘I have really enjoyed reading this book by Sharon Maas it is a lovely story and draws you in and I can highly recommend it. 5 stars!’ Netgalley reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ‘Maas’s books are always a delight, a chance to travel to some of the most beautiful parts of the world without ever leaving your home.’ Cayo Costa 72

This is the first English translation of one of the key works of 20th-century Venezuelan fiction. Published in 1949, Ana Isabel: A Respectable Girl by Antonia Palacios is a classic coming-of-age story set in Caracas in the 1920s, exploring issues of race, class, and gender and exposing the colonial and patriarchal legacy of the country in the era before urban development and the dependence on an oil economy. A modern Latin American classic and the Venezuelan counterpart of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street(1984), Ana Isabel: A Respectable Girl broke with the symbolic realist genre in vogue in Latin American narrative works and inaugurated a new form of expression with poetic overtones.

'Maggie Harris mines the hidden corners of marriage, motherhood, exile, and the places we choose to call home... Whether exploring Guyana's junglescapes and flatlands, Irish cliffs or rural Wales, her characters arrive on the page eager to tell their stories.' – Sharon Millar '...bitter-sweet, beautifully written tales.' – Janet Montefiore Maggie Harris' short-story collection Writing on Water is told through voices from the Caribbean where she was born and Britain where she has lived as an adult, and through them, the wider world. These are stories of migration, belonging and survival, of children and families brought together or torn apart. This is a varied collection containing stories such as 'Sending for Chantal', a story of Caribbean migration about a child who hasn't seen her mum since she was 4 and is now in her 30s, which was the Regional Winner of The Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014. Maggie, who lives in West Wales, writes poetry and prose and also won the poetry section of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2014.

Celebrated for the authenticity of its vernacular style and the incandescence of its lyricism, One Day of Life depicts a typical day in the life of a peasant family caught up in the terror and corruption of civil war in El Salvador. 5:30 A.M. in Chalate, a small rural town: Lupe, the grandmother of the Guardado family and the central figure of the novel, is up and about doing her chores. By 5:00 P.M. the plot of the novel has been resolved, with the Civil Guard's search for and interrogation of Lupe's young granddaughter, Adolfina. Told entirely from the perspective of the resilient women of the Guardado family, One Day of Life is not only a disturbing and inspiring evocation of the harsh realities of peasant life in El Salvador after fifty years of military exploitation; it is also a mercilessly accurate dramatization of the relationship of the peasants to both the state and the church. Translated from the Spanish by Bill Brow

This edited collection explores LGBTQ+ literature for young readers around the world, and connects this literature to greater societal, political, linguistic, historical, and cultural concerns. It brings together contributions from across the academic and activist spectra, looking at picture books, middle-grade books and young adult novels to explore what is at stake when we write (or do not write) about LGBTQ+ topics for young readers. The topics include the representation of sexualities and gender identities; depictions of queer families; censorship; links between culture, language and sexuality/gender; translation of LGBTQ+ literature for young readers; and self-publishing. It is the first collection to expand the study of LGBTQ+ literature for young readers beyond the English-speaking world and to draw cross-cultural comparisons.