Books to Celebrate Caribbean American Heritage Month
Caribbean American Heritage Month recognizes the rich cultural heritage of people of Caribbean descent and their myriad contributions to the United States of America. Below is a sample of literary works of fiction and nonfiction by Caribbean authors—all with a keen eye to promote, educate, and inspire lifelong readers. At the end, you will find external links to more reading lists.
Fiction: New & Noteworthy
Black Cake
by Charmaine Wilkerson
Two estranged siblings try to reclaim the closeness they once shared while trying to piece together their late mother’s life story and fulfill her last request of sharing a traditional Caribbean black cake “when the time is right.”
Daylight Come
by Diana McCaulay
In a future where global warming has forever altered the world's way of life, Sorrel, who lives on the totalitarian island of Bajacu, makes a harrowing journey for higher ground, facing the blistering sun and packs of feral animals with a taste for human flesh.
The Mermaid of Black Conch
by Monique Roffey
In 1976, mermaid Aycayia, after being rescued from American tourists, relearns what it is to be human, navigating her relationship with others on the island—a difficult task after centuries of loneliness—and growing to love her rescuer as she tries to find a way to escape her curse.
Monster in the Middle
by Tiphanie Yanique
Vibrant and emotionally riveting, Monster in the Middle moves across decades, from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple's romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing.
Moon Witch, Spider King
by Marlon James
This second book in the The Dark Star trilogy delves into the world of Sogolon, where she, a 177-year-old witch, tells her side of the story of what happened to a mysterious boy, as well as her century-long feud with the powerful Aesi, chancellor to the king.
Pleasantview
by Celeste Mohammed
Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Nonfiction: New & Noteworthy
Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family's Story of Slavery
by Alex Renton
One man’s personal discovery of his family’s involvement in transatlantic slavery leads to his call for a wider reckoning among the descendants of slave owners.
Caribbean Flavors for Every Season: 85 Coconut, Ginger, Shrimp, and Rum Recipes
by Brigid Washington
This innovative cookbook presents a new way to look at the four seasons through four ingredients that are integral to Caribbean flavors and culture, but available everywhere.
Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix
by Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh
Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume, Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora.
Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America
by Winston James
Examining the way in which the characteristics of the societies they left shaped their perceptions of the land to which they traveled, Winston James draws sharp differences between Hispanic, Anglophone, and other non-Hispanic arrivals.
Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene
by Mimi Sheller
Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe.
Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel
by Njelle W. Hamilton
Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel.
Language and Literature
Bury My Clothes
by Roger Bonair-Agard
A stirring meditation on violence, race, and the place in art at which they intersect.
Thicker Than Water: New Writing from the Caribbean
edited by Funso Aiyejina
The latest release from Caribbean publisher Peekash Press celebrates some of the major new voices in Anglophone Caribbean literature.
Things I Have Withheld: Essays
by Kei Miller
In this moving, critical, and lyrical collection of essays, by the acclaimed Forward Prize winner, Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept.
What Noise Against the Cane
by Desiree C. Bailey
What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America.
Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed: 15 Voices from the Latinx Diaspora
by Saraciea J. Fennell
Sparking dialogue and hope, 15 original stories by best-selling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices question the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora.
Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart: Pioneering Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall
by Kenneth Bilby
This is the first book devoted to the studio musicians who were central to Jamaica's popular-music explosion.
Classic Literature
Annie John
by Jamaica Kincaid
The author of a prize-winning collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, presents her first novel, about a girl growing up in Antigua and her ambivalent but inescapable relationship with her mother.
Before Night Falls: A Memoir
by Reinaldo Arenas
A memoir about being free—sexually, politically and artistically—chronicles the tumultuous yet luminary life of the author, from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba to his imprisonment as a homosexual to the events leading to his death in New York
Brown Girl, Brownstones
by Paule Marshall
Selina Boyce, the daughter of immigrants from Barbados, becomes aware of her passions as she grows to womanhood in Brooklyn and experiences the conflict between two cultures.
A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S Naipaul
Owning a small portion of the Trinidad earth and a respectable house of his own is the dream that sustains Mohun Biswas through a life of frustration and despair after he marries into the domineering Tulsi family.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Forced to flee their native Caribbean island after an attempted coup, the Garcias—Carlos, Laura, and their four daughters—must learn a new way of life in the Bronx, while trying to cling to the old ways that they loved.
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle.
Arts, Culture, Resistance
Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo
by Reggie Fils-Aimé
Gaming legend and boss level disruptor Reggie Fils-Aimé, retired President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America Inc., shares leadership lessons and inspiring stories from his unlikely rise to the top.
High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture
by Kevin Adonis Browne
Vivid photographs and essays that deliver an extraordinary immersion in Caribbean identity and ritual performance.
Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History
by Elizabeth Ferrer
Whether at UFW picket lines in California’s Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people.
New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
by Benjamin Lapidus
An assessment, celebration, and careful notation of the extraordinary melting pot of Latin music.
Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games
by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
A trailblazing book on the depiction of the Haitian Revolution in film and video games.
A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou: Rasin Figuier, Rasin Bwa Kayiman, and the Rada and Gede Rites
by Benjamin Hebblethwaite
A unique historical examination of Haitian Vodou's political and religious origins.
Biography & Memoir
Better Days Will Come Again: The Life of Arthur Briggs, Jazz Genius of Harlem, Paris, and a Nazi Prison Camp
by Travis Atria
This book chronicles the life of black jazz trumpeter, vocalist, and bandleader Arthur Briggs, from his early years in Grenada, through his teens in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance period, and his career in jazz in Europe after WWI.
Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior
by Ric Prado
A memoir by the highest-ranking covert warrior to lift the veil of secrecy and offer a glimpse into the shadow wars that America has fought since the Vietnam Era.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
by Roxane Gay
Best-selling author of Bad Feminist explores the devastating act of violence that triggered her personal challenges with food and body image, sharing advice for caring for oneself and eating in healthful and satisfying ways.
Miss Pat: My Reggae Music Journey from Mento, Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae to Dancehall
by Patricia Chin
VP Records co-founder, and one of the reigning matriarchs of Reggae music, Patricia “Miss Pat” Chin, continues to lead the largest independent label and distributor of Caribbean music.
Riff: The Shake Keane Story
by Philip Nanton
Riff explores the turbulent life of the musician and poet Shake Keane who migrated from St Vincent to London in the 1950s where became a significant figure on the free form jazz scene and innovative poet.
Running Sideways: The Olympic Champion Who Made Track and Field History
by Pauline Davis with T. R. Todd
The inspiring story of Pauline Davis, a Bahamian sprinter who fought through poverty, inequality, and racism to compete in five Olympic games and become the first woman from the Caribbean to win Olympic gold.
Fiction: Character Driven
Bivouac
by Kwame Dawes
The death of a Jamaican man's father raises questions about the father's political endeavors, and about the plight of 1980s Jamaica.
Island Queen
by Vanessa Riley
A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies.
Of Women and Salt
by Gabriela Garcia
The daughter of a Cuban immigrant battles addiction and the fallout of her decision to take in the child of an ICE detainee, while her mother wrestles with displacement trauma and complicated family tiesQueenie
by Candice Carty-Williams
Constantly compared to her white middle-class peers, a young Jamaican woman in London makes a series of questionable decisions in the aftermath of a messy breakup before challenging herself to figure out who she wants to be.
A Tall History of Sugar
by Curdella Forbes
Winner of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, A Tall History of Sugar is a gift for grown-up fans of fairy tales and those who love fiction that metes out hard and surprising truths.
These Ghosts Are Family
by Maisy Card
A man on his deathbed reveals that he stole another man’s identity decades earlier, traces the family’s history from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem and reconnects with the firstborn daughter he never knew.
Caribbean Connections Book Club - Top Picks
Caribbean Connections is an ongoing program series at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library that explores the intersection of literature, history, the arts, and culture throughout the Caribbean diaspora.
Augustown
by Kei Miller
Set in the backlands of Jamaica, Augustown is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.
Everything Inside: Stories
by Edwidge Danticat
A collection of short stories set in such locales as Miami, Port-au-Prince, and the Caribbean explores the forces that unite and divide.
Love After Love
by Ingrid Persaud
In vibrant, addictive Trinidadian prose, Love After Love questions who and how we love, the obligations of family, and the consequences of choices made in desperation.
Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming
by Antonio Michael Downing
Blending mythology and memory, Saga Boy follows a young Black immigrant's vibrant personal metamorphosis.
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers—in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.
The Taste of Sugar
by Marisel Vera
Marisel Vera emerges as a major voice of contemporary fiction with a heart- wrenching novel set in Puerto Rico on the eve of the Spanish-American War.
More Reading Lists
- The 100 Caribbean Books That Made Us (Bocas Lit Fest)
- 30+ Unforgettable Books by Caribbean Writers - Book-aneers of the Caribbean (LoveReading)
- Essential Boricua Reading List For The 2016 Holiday Season (Center for Puerto Rican Studies)
- Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival)
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.