The Pages of the Sea
by Anne Hawk
Publication Date: Oct 01, 2024
List Price: $18.95
Format: Paperback, 312 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781771966535
Imprint: Biblioasis
Publisher: Biblioasis
Parent Company: Biblioasis
Description of The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk
On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.
When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?
A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.
PRAISE FOR THE PAGES OF THE SEA
“The writing is confident and precise; evocative of the beauty of the Caribbean islands, and full of sparkling observation.”
—The Guardian
“Hawk’s prose is beautiful, a lyrical and loving portrayal of an island and its people … A unique, scrappy, tender bildungsroman.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Pages of the Sea is a beautifully written and intimately imagined debut novel coming out of the Caribbean. Anne Hawk weaves a story rarely told, that of those left behind in the wake of migration to the ‘motherland’. Intensely moving and lyrical, here is a story of our times, another piece of the mosaic of our fractured and remade Caribbean lives.”
—Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch