Bøger udgivet af Peepal Tree Press Ltd

Uniquely pairing Caribbean grievances with political Islam, this intriguing novel begins as a sad story of unrequited love but descends into the nightmare world of a stalker. Told through the eyes of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the story opens with his boyhood memory of falling from a tree and being badly injured, after which he developed an obsessive attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong, who lived on the same sugar estate. Now, years later, Aziz lives in Canada and has become a highly paid engineer in the nuclear industry. Although he has a new life in a different country, Aziz still nurtures racial resentments about the way he was treated as a child on the sugar estate and has become a supporter of radical Islam. He also begins to fixate again on Alice and tracks her down. He finds that she is divorced and living in England and asks her to marry him. Though Aziz is telling the story, it is clear that Alice's apprehension is slowly mounting as she fears the violence that will occur if she turns him down.

What begins as a romantic tryst in a tropical setting quickly becomes, in this novel first published in 1938, an imaginative exploration of two opposing cultural and economic frameworks in the Caribbean--the dichotomy between the peasant plot, where cultivation and nature mingle, and the estate where land is simply an industrial resource. When Teresa Craddock rebuilds her life on an island resembling Dominica, she rediscovers lost passion by becoming involved with the new owner of an abandoned estate, Derek Morrel. Torn between her desires and the conflict of values with Morrel, the feisty, witty Teresa eventually comes to realize that Morrel's attitudes towards her body and the land are the same.

A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle--the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat--this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.

On an inward-looking island dominated by the Catholic Church, John Lestrade mourns both the death of friends and the inauthentic, suffocating quality of his own life. When he feels he can no longer find solace in his regular means of escape--a room on a hill--he forsakes his self-imposed exile and finds himself drawn to action and defiance. Opening himself up to change, John discovers hope and gleans the possibility of change and an escape from the inauthentic. Originally published in 1968, this intense and minimalist novel engages philosophical ideas, religious tradition, and colonial consciousness.

Told through the memories of John Campbell, an old man whose life goes back to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, this novel is an intensely vivid narrative of the history of Jamaican nationalism. In the present, John Campbell's grandnephew Garth listens eagerly to the old man's story, gathering information and advice for his generation's nationalist movement. First published in 1949, this novel is a pioneering work both in exploiting the rhythms of Caribbean language and recounting the making of Jamaican national consciousness from the perspective of the black majority. It explores the conflict between a violent and peaceful means in the struggle for social justice.

Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines th

This novel, set in a yard which is a microcosm of Kingston slum life, sets out as Mais himself said to give "a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful condition of the working classes."

Candid and sensitive, this collection journeys between Africa, Europe, and the Americas as the poet explores his family history. Told with wit and an engaging ambivalence, these narrative poems explore areas of imaginative fantasy, including a consideration of how the slave trade would have been different had its main mode of transportation been the hot-air balloon rather than the slave ship. Touching on both pain and rich rewards from the perspective of a black British poet, this volume's goal is to entertain, instruct, and encourage contemplation.

Exposing the political and cultural failure to address the challenges of postcolonial Trinidad, this insightful novel portrays a world where the working man must face the crime and violence that is destroying the social body. Walter Castle is dissatisfied with his regular job in the Laventille slum in Port of Spain. As the prospect of promotion is bleak and crime and lawless youth become insupportable, he dreams of going back to the village community he grew up in. Unfortunately, the force of nostalgia is not supported by actual memories and as Walter abandons his dreams he is forced to choose between turning into a drone who passes through life without leaving a mark, or standing up for himself. Originally published in 1965, this story remains surprisingly contemporary with its astringent critique of the top-down authoritarianism of nationalist politics.

Inspired by the word "red," this collection of poems written by black British writers--including both established authors and new, exciting poets--explores the subjects and ideas stirred by a single trigger, from the word's usual associations with blood, violence, passion, and anger, as well as with sensuality and sexuality, to more surprising interpretations such as the link to a particular mood, the quality of light in the sky, the color of skin, and the sound of a song. This remarkable compilation succeeds in generating poems that find an intriguing resonance with each other while also revealing images and themes unique to the individual poets.

A chance encounter at Kennedy Airport with her ex-husband, Saliou Wade, takes Magdalene and their now adult daughter, Khadi, on a visit to him and his new family in Senegal. Magdalene is understandably nervous about the return, remembering the pain of the mutual cultural incomprehension-she is a St Lucian-that ended the marriage almost twenty years

Exploring rites of passage in London's Asian community, this semiautobiographical novel follows a young Indo-Guyanese narrator from his South American village to Great Britain. With determination and self-discipline he seizes opportunities of education and upward mobility, but struggles to keep his cultural identity alive through memories of his childhood. This sophisticated postcolonial text links language and character to reveal the social divisions, educational obstacles, and self-exploration of a struggling foreigner in the mid-20th century.

"Connecting Medium links the past to the present, the Caribbean to England, mothers to fathers. Here are poems about identity and culture, generations and the future. A powerful sequence of poems about a black Medusa. Poems that link the material world to the spiritual one. Poems that recreate a sixties childhood in South London in vivid detail. Connecting Medium is full of energy and life. Hers is a bright, passionate voice.">Dorothea Smartt, born and raised in London, is of Barbadian heritage. Described as 'accessible and dynamic', her poetry appears in several journals and ground-breaking anthologies.

Eve has to watch her husband bring his paler mistress to the party she has so carefully prepared; Esther to deal with her rebellious daughter, and the guilt which attaches to her own youthful revolt against racial oppression; Joelle and Maryse must find ways of dealing with the incomprehension between village Africa and chic Frenchness in their Ivoirean lives; Gambian Doudou wants a traditional wife to end his loneliness in London; and Julia, in the title story, must fight to find herself again when her oldest friend dies of cancer. Whether living in Bermuda, America, London, the Gambia or the Cote d'Ivoire, the characters in these stories not only confront their individual traumas, but the ways in which, as people of the African diaspora, differences of colour, class and colonial heritage divide them both from each other and themselves. We are given revealing insights into Bermudian society, its tensions of race and culture and the geography that pulls some of its people closer to the USA, while others look to links with the Caribbean or the even more submerged links with Africa. But if we see the pain and alienation of uprooted people, what also moves through the stories is a sense of identity not as something fixed, but as an Atlantic flow, a circuit of peoples and cultures which has Africa as one of its starting points. And in that lies a unity that is real, if submarine. When Doudou listens to the Gambian music of his homeland in London, it is a music of multiple Atlantic crossings, powerfully influenced by Cuban rumba, itself born from African and European roots. And as Mame Koumba, pointing to his Black British grandchildren, tells Doudou, grieving for the loss of ancestral wholeness, 'They're not what you would have had in the Gambia. But they're what you have. And there's Africa in them all.' Angela Barry's stories demand an alertness to that kind of connection. Angela Barry lives and works in Bermuda. Her writing has been published in The Massachusetts Review and she is the recipient of a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship.

Nick Makoha's debut collection is named for the title poem, the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize poem "Kingdom of Gravity".

David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turner's celebrated poem "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying." Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting.