Book Cover Image of The Autobiography Of My Mother: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid

The Autobiography Of My Mother: A Novel
by Jamaica Kincaid

    Publication Date: May 07, 2013
    List Price: $14.00
    Format: Paperback, 240 pages
    Classification: Fiction
    ISBN13: 9780374531874
    Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
    Parent Company: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group

    Paperback Description:

    From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman’s courageous coming-of-agePowerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid’s novel is the deeply charged story of a woman’s life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.
    Kincaid takes us from Xuela’s childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela’s is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela’s barrenness and motherlessness.
    The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman’s inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.



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