Catalog Search Results
1) White teeth
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.9 - AR Pts: 29
Language
English
Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding...
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women--immigrants or the descendants of immigrants--who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to...
3) Queenie
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"'[B]rilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.'--Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You; Bridget Jones's Diary meets Americanah in this disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place. Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Centers on Abel and Vera Paisley, a working-class Jamaican couple striving to build a better life for their children. Abel travels to London in the early 1960s in search of fortune. Instead, he sees an opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life by faking his death and assuming a new identity. Vera, now a widow, is racked with guilt over her husband's "death" and takes out her grief on her children, Irene and Vincent. The effects of Abel's decision...
6) Small island
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 23
Language
English
Formats
Description
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"If you could choose your family...you wouldn't choose the Penningtons. Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn't really know them. Five people who don't have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad's gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. She's thirty, and her life isn't really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer...
8) Jamaica blue
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
When successful and charming rock journalist Mick Sever goes to Jamaica to see the 'next big thing', a reggae/rap band with a flare for hypnotic beats and violent lyrics, he finds that there's more than just sun, sand and music on the island of Jamaica. Danger, lies, sex and murder abound in the tropical paradise.
Led by front man Derrick Lyman, a talented and captivating performer with a radical political message, the band seems set for instant...
10) The Enigma game
Author
Publisher
Hyperion
Pub. Date
2020.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
Told in multiple voices, fifteen-year-old Jamaican Louisa Adair uncovers an Enigma machine in the small Scottish village where she cares for an elderly German woman, and helps solve a puzzle that could turn the tide of World War II.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In their journey to and across post-WWII America an ambitious Jamaican couple discovers the hope-shattering consequences of the color line. The tension between duty and fulfillment comes to a head during a fateful 1963 cross-country drive as they dispute what's best for their nine-year-old American-born son and he struggles to understand where his parents' love and happiness has gone.
12) This lovely city
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"London, 1950. With the war over and London still rebuilding, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England's call for labour. Arriving from Jamaica aboard the Empire Windrush, he's rented a tiny room in south London and fallen in love with the girl next door. Playing in Soho's jazz clubs by night and pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home -- and it's alive with possibility. Until one morning, while...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Best Books
Around the World: August in North America
New African American Non-Fiction
More Lists...
Around the World: August in North America
New African American Non-Fiction
More Lists...
Description
"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...
14) Patsy: a novel
Author
Language
English
Description
"When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother--or even...
15) Small island
Publisher
Distributed by PBS Distribution
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
Explores the lives of two couples, one Jamaican and the other English, whose worlds intertwine in post-World War II Britain, at a turning point in the long relationship between the two countries. It is a story of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers.
Publisher
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
College-bound romantic Daniel Bae and Jamaica-born pragmatist Natasha Kingsley meet, and fall for each other, over one magical day amidst the fervor and flurry of New York City. Sparks immediately fly between these two strangers, who might never have met had fate not given them a little push. But will fate be enough to take these teens from star-crossed to lucky in love?
Author
Publisher
Ballantine Books
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
This collection of short stories sweeps from close-knit island communities on Jamaica to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns. In them, Arthurs forms a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. -- adapted from jacket
Series
Publisher
Film Movement
Language
English
Description
Jude is a single mother who descends from a long line of Jamaican caregivers. Silence is a "past his prime" boxer who fights illegally to survive. Ciel is a boy who delves into music, conjuring dreams for his mother. During the last week of summer, a late-night brawl finds the fighter in the nurse's care, causing their three fates to be forever entwined.
20) Fire rush
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she goes raving with her friends, the "Tombstone Estate gyals," at The Crypt, an underground dub reggae club in their industrial town on the outskirts of London. Raised by her distant father after her mother's disappearance when she was a girl, Yamaye...