Jamaica Kincaid

From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua. 'If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him-why not a school, why not a hospital,...

The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations. Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple-handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities...

The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy.

A marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future -- book jacket.