Anna In-Between

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (September 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354844
ISBN-13: 978-1933354842
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches

Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez’s finest literary achievement to date. In spare prose, with laserlike attention to every word and the juxtaposition of words to each other, Nunez returns to themes of emotional alienation, within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in her earlier novels.

Anna, the novel’s main character who has a successful publishing career in the United States, is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother, Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to persuade her to go to the United States for treatment, even though it is, perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to remain respectful of his wife’s wishes, must convince her to change her mind.

Prospero's Daughter
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ISBN: 0345455355
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: February 28, 2006
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

2006 Novel of the Year Black Issues Book Review

Praise for Prospero's Daughter
"Prospero's Daughter is a stunning achievement. Elizabeth Nunez, with fluid, vivid writing, guides the reader through a magical, dangerous landscape. Beneath the unrelenting tropical sun, against the currents and tides of the sea, a Caribbean island of secrets and shadows is laid bare. This is a novel of thrilling twists and turns, describing a place of order and disorder. Nunez has used Shakespeare's Tempest as a point of departure--only that.  Her vision of this "brave new world" and its inhabitants, is wonderful, original. In painterly prose, she unveils the landscape tempered by colonialism, she unmasks the colonizer, and lifts the curtain that has been drawn across history." —Michelle Cliff, author of Free Enterprise 

See the blurbs:
"Nunez critiques colonialist assumptions about race and class in this ambitious reworking of The Tempest, set in her native Trinidad in the early 1960s. . . . [It has] strong themes and dramatic ironies. Readers will find her love story—which has a refreshingly happy ending—very sensitively told." —Publishers Weekly

"PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER is a resounding success, one that should definitely establish [Elizabeth] Nunez's importance in English...literature." —The Harvard Review.

Prospero’s Daughter is a “gripping and richly imagined…novel…. Nunez, who is a master at pacing and plotting, explores the motivations behind Caliban’s outburst, hatching an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him…. The key to her exoneration of Caliban: give the women on the island a voice.”
—New York Times Book Review . Also picked for Editor’s Choice, NYTBR

Nunez is in top form with this ambitious interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. . . . Along with characters who virtually demand attention, the novel's intense imagery, powerful themes of race and class, and keen evocations of Caribbean land- and seascapes create a broad reader appeal. Recommended.
—Library Journal

In Prospero’s Daughter, Trinidad-born novelist Elizabeth Nunez airlifts Shakespeare’s The Tempest to a remote Caribbean island where a demonically brilliant English doctor accuses his young local protégé (the story’s mixed-race Caliban) of trying to destroy his daughter’s innocence. Part romance, part detective story, part searing social critique, Nunez’s fiction, with its lush, lyric cadences and whirlwind narrative, casts a seductive spell.
—O (Oprah’s) Magazine

Exquisite retelling of The Tempest….Nunez’s masterful story plays out against the backdrop of Trinidadian hopes for independence, achieved the following year. Simply wonderful.
—Kirkus Starred review

About the Book:
Prospero's Daughter is a brilliantly conceived, contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in the lush Caribbean during the height of tensions between the island population and British colonists. It is the story of a boy and a girl who come of age and commit the ultimate taboo, unfolding against a backdrop of intensely political and relevant questions of race, class, and power.

Cut off from the main island of Trinidad by a glistening green sea, Chacachacare has few inhabitants, but for the lepers and a British doctor who fled from England with his three-year-old daughter, Virginia. An unconscionable genius, Peter Gardner had used his talents to unsavory ends, experimenting with his medicinal concoctions on unsuspecting patients, many of whom died from his treatments. Blackmailed by his own brother, Peter ends up on the small island, as England's colonial reach is starting to crumble.

There Peter focuses his experiments on the wild flora of the Caribbean- and the orphan, Carlos, whose home he steals. Though deeming the boy inferior because of the darkness of his skin, Peter decides to educate the "savage" and schools the child alongside his own. But as Carlos and Virginia grow up under the same roof, they become deeply and covertly attached to one another-until Gardner finds out and accuses Carlos of a heinous crime.
It is up to a brusque, racially insensitive English inspector to discover the truth. But when Peter's native housekeeper, Ariana, steps forward with the shocking statement that Virginia and Carlos are in love, a disturbing picture begins to emerge. For Ariana has her own reason for exposing Peter's lies, as a monstrous secret is finally drawn into the light.

Grace
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ISBN: 0345455347
Format: Paperback, 352pp
Pub. Date: February 28, 2006
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Praise for Grace:
"Extremely deserving of its title, this gorgeous, meditative book is a graceful rendering of one couple's journeys and explorations toward and away from each other. A moving love story, it shows us how a deferred dream can erode a marriage and how grace can sometimes put us to the test, even as it redeems."
―Edwidge Danticat

“Nunez’s latest (after Discretion) is a perceptive and moving tale of an African American middle-class marriage struggling to right itself amid tremors of self-discovery….In exquisitely tuned prose, Nunez depicts a man’s lonely attempt to save his marriage while honoring his roots.”
―Publisher’s Weekly

About the Book
Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature who reads Shakespeare to his four-year-old daughter, Giselle. A native of Trinidad and the product of a strict, English-style education, Justin and his focus on the works of “Dead White Men” receive little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, has begun to pull away from him, both physically and emotionally.

Harlem-born Sally Peters, a mother on the verge of turning forty, is a primary school teacher who believes that joy is a learned skill, and that it takes strength to be happy. After a life of tragic losses, Sally thought she had finally found that strength when she met Justin.

But now, Sally wants something more. And Justin is angered by her uncertainty about their life and frightened by the thought that perhaps Sally never stopped loving the ex-boyfriend for whom she wrote fierce poems. Is he, Justin wonders, responsible for helping Sally find meaning in her life—a life that seems to him most fortunate? If Sally and Justin’s union is to survive, both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.

Set in a snow-covered Brooklyn, Grace is a thoughtful and lovely meditation on trust, redemption, and family. Elizabeth Nunez’s delicate prose brings the struggles, aches, and tender moments of this contemporary urban love story into vivid focus.

ISBN: 0345447328
Format: Paperback, 276pp
Pub. Date: July 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Read an Excerpt from Discretion

About the Book
From American Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez, a powerful novel that explores an intricate lovers’ triangle, the human thirst for passion, and the myriad ways desire can betray those who have fallen under its spell.

Descended from warriors and raised by missionaries, Oufoula is a diplomat whose wealth and charm make him both publicly admired and envied. From a tragic childhood he emerged a man who leads a disciplined life of respect, married to Nerida, a woman he did not want to deceive. But the beautiful Marguerite, a Jamaican-born artist living in New York, makes him question what ideals he can live by, and which values he can betray.

For twenty years, Oufoula has carried a secret in his heart, a secret of his love for Marguerite. Though they have been separated for two decades by Marguerite’s call for propriety, Oufoula refuses to let his desire wane. When the lovers are at last reunited, the rekindling of their passion forces Oufoula to come to terms with the core of his character: Is he willing to sacrifice his marriage, his career, and the very foundations of the life he has struggled to create, all for the love of one woman?

Oufoula’s confession is adorned with the literature of his European education, and shrouded by the spirits and responsibilities of Africa. Caught between myth and reason, Oufoula reveals himself to be a soul trapped in every way, who, like Faust, would bargain with the devil for fulfillment . . . but was never offered any choice.

This is the portrait of a man who cannot be forgotten. A gripping, masterfully crafted tale of love, deceit, and the human compulsion for power.  Discretion forces us to reconsider that ever-compelling question: At what price passion?

ISBN: 0345451090
Format: Paperback, 304pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

"Bruised Hibiscus is an American masterpiece."
―Sapphire, author of Push

Praise for Bruised Hibiscus
"I just finished Bruised Hibiscus and the book is nothing short of AMAZING! Easily, one of the best books of the year. I'm ready to climb the proverbial mountain and sing its praises."
―Thumper, AALBC.com

About the Book
An incendiary, brilliantly imagined new novel by Elizabeth Nunez, Bruised Hibiscus is a spellbinding tale of explosive passions.

In the village of Otahiti on the island of Trinidad, a fisherman pulls the body of a white woman from the sea. News travels quickly through the small island, and the conclusion "man-woman business" prevails as the assumed motive for the murder. The rage that surfaces as a result of the murder--born of generations of colonialism, sexual oppression and class disparity--is the catalyst for the reunion of two childhood friends, Rose and Zuela.

Inseparable companions during the August holidays of their twelfth year, the two girls witness an unspeakable act through the leaves of a hibiscus bush and shame divides them for twenty years. Rosa, from a family of white plantation owners, falls in love with a black school headmaster named Cedric. Zuela marries a Chinese immigrant three times her age and gives birth to ten children in as many years. Although their lives diverge, both women suffer at the hands of the men they marry. Memories of the horror witnessed at the hibiscus bush resurface upon hearing about the murdered woman, bringing Rosa and Zuela together in a desperate search for liberation.

Vivid and impassioned, Bruised Hibiscus is a story of collective memory and personal history, of power and oppression, and ultimately, of the struggle for freedom.

Beyond the Limbo Silence

ISBN: 0345451082
Format: Paperback, 321pp
Pub. Date: July 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

“This powerful illumination of race and culture by the light of dreams, ritual, and Vodoun will remind many of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker." –Booklist (starred review)

"Beyond the Limbo Silence should garner the large readership that Elizabeth Nunez deserves. This novel reads like a fable, with its legends, mythic creatures and memorable characters. Ms. Nunez has shown that one doesn't have to travel south of the border to find magic realism. And though it has become a cliché to call an author's writing 'beautiful,' this adjective accurately describes the writing in Beyond the Limbo Silence."
 — Ishmael Reed

About the Book
When Sara Edgehill is given a scholarship to leave Trinidad and attend a college in Wisconsin, she is thrilled. America, the one she has seen in the movies, is a land of dreams, prosperity, and equality. Not like Trinidad, where her parents cast disappointed glances her way because she wasn’t born with lighter-colored skin. But when Sara leaves her island’s brilliant green fields and warm sparkling waters for the pale cornfields of the Midwest, the ties to her home and her past grip her as strongly as America’s cold, winter winds.

For as soon as Sara sets foot in her new home, she must make tough decisions. Wanting desperately to fit in, she begins to understand that in America, the color lines run deeper than they did even in Trinidad. And as Sara forms ties with two other West Indian students–the beguiling, haunted Courtney and the passionate, vivacious Sam–she is irrevocably pulled into the very center of America’s exploding civil rights movement.

Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad
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Elizabeth Nunez (Editor), Jennifer Sparrow (Editor)

ISBN: 1580051391
Format: Paperback, 288pp
Pub. Date: December 2005
Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group

Stories from Blue Latitudes gathers the major and emerging women fiction writers from the Caribbean, including Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Merle Collins, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kinkaid, Paule Marshall, and Pauline Melville. Similar themes grace their stories of life at home and abroad. In some, the sexual exploitation of Caribbean girls and women becomes a metaphor for neocolonialism, a biting rejoinder to enticing travel brochures that depict the Caribbean as a tropical playground and encourage Americans to "make it your own." Other tales deal with the sad legacy of colonial history and the ways in which race, skin color, and class complicate relationships between men and women, parents and children.

But whether writing about childhood or adulthood, life in the islands or life abroad, the writers express their particular concerns with a passion that comes from lived experience, and with a love of place and a feminist sensibility that are accessible to new readers of Caribbean literature as well as to an academic audience. "What matters is how well we have told our tale, how well we have drawn pictures of the people and places we write about, " Nunez says. And indeed, this anthology makes those pictures come alive.

Elizabeth Nunez (Editor)  Brenda M. Greene (Editor)

Format: Paperback, 250pp.
ISBN: 0820442615
Publisher: Lang, Peter Publishing, Incorporated
Pub. Date: April  1999

About the Book
Defining Ourselves offers perspectives on black literature in the 1990s by twenty-nine black writers and critics, including Paule Marshall, Amiri Baraka, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, Walter Mosley, Marita Golden, Thulani Davis, Jill Nelson, Arthur Flowers, Lorna Goodison, Bebe Moore Campbell, Brent Staples, Terry McMillan, Stanley Crouch, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara Christian, Karla FC Holloway, and William W. Cook. The essays in this book are based on papers presented at the Fourth National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, which focused on the question of whether or not black literature in the 90s is experiencing a renaissance to end all renaissances. In addition to this topic, this book addresses the issues of the universality of black literature, the changing tastes and concerns of black readers, and the politics of publishing.

Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 320pp.
ISBN: 0345380681
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.
Pub. Date: October  1992
Edition Desc: 1st Ballantine Books trade ed