Brother Man

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Brother Man

Roger Mais

Originally published in 1954 and acclaimed around the world as one of the classics of Caribbean fiction, Brother Man, is the tragic story of an honest Rastafarian healer caught up in a web of intrigue and betrayal in Jamaica's tough West Kingston slums.

The healer's name is John Power, but everybody calls him Brother Man - a cobbler whose ability to cure the sick and injured through a mystic force uplifts him to the status of a prophet. Throngs begin to trail him when he passes in the street. With each miracle performed his reputation spreads.

Looking on with envy is the evil Papacita, a violent enforcer whose authority is threatened by Brother Man's message of peace and love. Papacita's jealousy is stirred in more ways than one. The brutal schemer also covets the attention of Minette, a young attractive girl that Brother Man has rescued from the streets.

Set in the same rambunctious lanes that reggae icons like Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff would later stroll and sing about, Brother Man, is the unforgettable portrait of a ghetto saint - an ordinary man selected by the universe to bring enlightenment to poor belittled people. It's a story of compelling mythic power that has stood the test of time.

The Author
Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1905 and died in 1955. Educated at Calabar High School and first employed in the Civil Service, he later moved from job to job in a variety of fields, including banana tallyman, photographer, insurance salesman and reporter, which allowed him the time for his own creative work. He was a painter, a poet and a prolific writer of versatility.

Besides his writings for the Daily Gleaner and Public Opinion, he published two collections of short stories, wrote nearly forty plays for stage or radio, and finished eight novels. Some critics consider Black Lightning (1955) his finest novel, but it was the first two of his three published novels, The Hills were Joyful Together (1953), a yard story that draws on Mais's own prison experience, and Brother Man (1954), in praise of the Rastafarian way of life, that made his name as a novelist of social protest.

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Joseph
A Rasta Reggae Fable

Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah


Joseph is a reggae superstar, admired by his musical peers and adored by women wherever he goes. But Joseph is also a devout, herb-smoking Rastafarian who dreams of a new life in Ethiopia. Sister Ashanti chronicles Joseph’s rise to international stardom, his stormy relationship with the beautiful and passionate Zuleika, his uneasy truce with the press and in particular the intrusive American journalist Sam Bergman. But for all his peaceable Rasta way of life, in certain quarters Joseph is seen as a threat. The concert that is to seal the Peace, ending gang warfare in Kingston, instead ends in the terrible moment when Joseph is shot in the back on stage. Ashanti and her husband Peter are spirited away to Miami and Cuba, not knowing if Joseph is alive or dead, until after many adventures the friends find themselves reunited in Shashemane and the mystical Emmanuel.


Jamaica-born Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah has been a Rastafarian since the 1970s, and is a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. As well as Joseph - A Rasta Reggae Fable, a novel inspired by the life of Bob Marley, Hannah wrote Rastafari - The New Creation, the first text on Rastafari to be written by a practising member of the faith. Journalist, broadcaster and producer- director of 8 films, she began by working with her father’s news magazine, then in 1964 moved to England, where she became Britain’s first black TV journalist, on Thames TV’s Today programme. Returning to Jamaica in 1972, she worked in a range of media, and also in the Office of the Prime Minister under both Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. She served as an Independent Senator in Parliament from 1984 to 1987. She and her home-schooled son now run TechSchool Jamaica.

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Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica

Anonymous



When the young Scotsman George Marly arrives in Jamaica in 1816, his only ambition is to recover his inheritance. But before long he falls in love with the daughter of Simon McFathom, the unscrupulous attorney whose sharp practices have deprived him of his ancestral estate. Will Marly be able to win back his grandfather’s plantation of Happy Fortune and secure the hand of the beauteous Miss McFathom?

Written by a Scotsman who had experienced life on a sugar estate at first hand, the novel (originally published in Glasgow at the height of the British debate about colonial slavery) offers us vivid details of the complexities of Jamaican society in the last years before Emancipation. Glimpses of the daily routine of a plantation appear with an almost cinematic realism, and we are introduced not just to the busha and the book-keeper, but also to the slave boilers and artisans, the domestics and hot-house attendants, the drivers and the field-hands, and even to the obeah-man and the runaway. The planting attorney from Argyllshire who will only hire book-keepers who can speak Gaelic is just of many reminders of the prominence of Scotsmen in the development of Jamaica and the British colonial empire.

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Dog War NEW!

In this new and highly original take on Jamaican life, Winkler, the Caribbean’s unrivalled master of adult comedy, introduces the estimable Precious, a large-bottomed, meltingly juicy Christian Jamaican woman with unshakeable ideas on the right and proper behaviour for Christian Jamaican women, their husbands, and men and dogs in general. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, Precious finds her ideas on proper behaviour assailed on every side, first in Kingston with her unwelcoming daughter in-law, and then in Miami with her gun toting daughter.
Precious spends many hours under her bed, checking proprieties with Jamaican Jesus, and on top of her bed, checking improprieties with the factotum Mannish, who is suffering the penalties of stealing camels in a previous life. Obliged to get a job as a dog-maid, however, Precious is outraged to discover that most improper of all are the attentions of her mistress’s preposterously pampered pet, Riccardo.


The Anthony C. Winkler Collection

Anthony C. Winkler was born in Jamaica, and was educated in Jamaica and America. His first novel, The Painted Canoe, was published in Jamaica in 1984. The Lunatic followed in 1987, and Winkler also wrote the screenplay for a highly successful film of this novel.

Other works include The Great Yacht Race (1992), Going Home to Teach (1995) and The Duppy (1997). In 1999 his original screenplay The Annihilation of Fish, was filmed in Los Angeles. Starring opposite James Earl Jones with Margot Kidder, Lynn Redgrave won Palm Beach Best Actress for her role as Poinsettia. He resides with his wife, Cathy, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

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Alonso and the Drug Baron

Evan Jones

Everybody wants Alonso dead.

Detective Sergeant Swaby of the Jamaica Constabulary, who has set him up to take the rap for Chin Lee’s murder, wants Alonso dead. The assassin Bulldog, who threw Chin Lee’s body over the balcony of one-one-one, wants Alonso dead. The powerful but impotent drug baron Leprosini, whom Chin Lee was trying to double-cross, wants Alonso dead. The corrupt minister Magnus Bonanza, in cahoots with Leprosini, wants Alonso dead. Even Ras [censored], the magnificently endowed freedom fighter, will kill Alonso if he makes a wrong move.

Inoffensive and harmless, Alonso finds himself arrested, kidnapped, shot at, on the run and feigning madness. To cap it all, someone lands a plane on his head. The only way Alonso can hope to return to his pleasantly idle life as nightwatchman at the Casuarina Cottage Hotel, where he enjoys five star cuisine and the warm arms of Precious Ting, is to find out the true facts of Chin Lee’s death and so persuade Authority to exonerate him.

Evan Jones was born in Jamaica in 1927 and was educated at Haverford College USA and Oxford University.
He has written numerous plays for television, and screenplays for films. He has also has many publications, including The Song of the Banana Man, which is widely known and anthologized.
He is married to the actress Joanna Jones. They have two daughters who are both writers.

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The Boy From Willow Bend

Joanne C. HillhouseOne by one, all the women and girls in Vere's young life abandon him. His laughing mother. Big hearted Tanty. Brave, stubborn June. Pudgy Kim next door. Drunkin' Angela. Romantic Makeba the Rasta Queen. His uptown girlfriend Elisabeth. The only constant presence in his dilapidated Dead End home, as Vere matures from a mischievous small boy to a gifted but aimless fifteen year old young man, is his abusive grandfather, a retired policeman who drinks away his pension cheques and regularly uses his thick uniform belt to keep resentful Vere in line. In the end even his grandfather leaves him, and all Vere has to depend on, as he has done for years, is himself. But that self, honed by deprivation, violence and loneliness, is one of remarkable character - comical, courageous, sensitive, musically talented, bright enough to skip a year of Primary School and win a scholarship for his secondary education. All the teenaged Vere needs is loving guidance and a chance

Joanne C. Hillhouse is an exciting new writer from Antigua. She writes poetry as well as fiction, and had her first piece published while she was still at school. Since then her work has appeared in publications both in Antigua and internationally, but the finely crafted The Boy from Willow Bend, with its faithful recreation of island life and the challenges of adolescence, is her first book. A journalist by profession, specializing in environmental education in the print, broadcast and internet media. Joanne has written a screenplay for The Boy from Willow Bend, and a second novel, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight.

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Brown Face, Big Master

Joyce Gladwell


Joyce Gladwell grew up in Jamaica, a 'brown face' in a country where black and white were often at opposite ends of the social scale. 'Big Master' (in the country dialect she used as a child) is God.

First published in 1969, the second edition of this open, forthright story of her life reveals a deep awareness of some of the major social issues and personal problems of our time - race, colour, human relationships, mixed marriage, the search for God. With vivid descriptions of people and her surroundings, she tells of her Jamaican school days and the attitudes and prejudices which influenced her; of her life as a psychology student at London University; of the discrimination against her which came to a head when her proposed marriage to an Englishman was opposed by his family; and of her early problems of adjustment in marriage.

Edited, and with a new introduction, by Sandra Courtman, the graphic detail and sympathetic insight of this book will make compelling reading.

Joyce Gladwell was born in Jamaica, and graduated with a B.A. in Psychology and Anthropology from University College London in 1956. Brown Face, Big Master was first published in 1969, by Inter Varsity Press, London. Since 1969 Joyce has lived in Canada with her husband Graham, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. They have three sons and two grandchildren. Joyce is a Marriage and Family Therapist.

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Creoleana
and The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black

J. W. Orderson



Published in 1842 and set in 1790s Barbados, this is perhaps the earliest novel of the Anglophone Caribbean to have been written by a native of the region.

The romantic tale of Jack Goldacre's eventually successful efforts to win the hand of Caroline Fairfield is interwoven with the much gloomier story of Caroline's black half-sister Lucy, whose search for love and happiness is confused and at length confounded by the prejudices of class and race inherent in the very nature of slave society.

There are many fascinating vignettes of life in Barbados at the end of the eighteenth century, from ballooning experiments to the famous episode of Prince William Henry's uproarious night out at Rachel Pringle's hotel.

This edition also includes Orderson's The Fair Barbadian and the Faithful Black, a comedy performed in Barbados in 1832 whose character Hampshire offers the most extensive representation of black Barbadian speech known from the slavery period.

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For Nothing At All

Garfield Ellis

Wesley was the bright one, the one who was going to do well. He was also the only boy at the White Marl All Age School ever to “dust” big, fast Red Head. That was the sun-drenched day Wes and his friends decided to scull school.

They went fishing, stole sugar cane, fled from a cane fire, were shot at by the ranger and lost their clothes. It was a glorious day. But as the years passed the friends grew apart, forced by circumstance along dark paths of corruption and death, devotion or madness, leaving their sunlit dreams in tatters.

Wes continued to study hard, but it was the boys who left school before him who seemed to do well, with their weed, their guns, their flashy clothes and new cars. And when Wes graduated with the best results his school had ever seen, he couldn’t get a job.

Eventually he was obliged to take work on a construction site, mediating between two gangs, both of which had threatened his life. Even so, he seemed the only one of the friends still with a chance, still not trapped by the system.

Until Danny Bruck Foot moved in on him.

The Author
Garfield Ellis was born in 1960, the eldest of nine children in Central Village, Jamaica. In his varied career he has worked as a marine engineering officer, as engineering supervisor in property management, as the marketing and placement director of the Jamaica Maritime Institute, and is now the Operations Manager at the Jamaica Observer. His first published collection of short stories, Flaming Hearts, and a later unpublished novel both won the Una Marson award. He has also won the Canute A Brodhurst prize for fiction and the 1990 Heineman/Lifestyle short story competition.

For Nothing At All is his second novel for MCW, the first being Such As I Have (2003).

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Ginger Lily

Margaret Knight


Samantha's childhood playmate, the wealthy, handsome and amiable Tony Brownfield, has begun dating Sam since her return to Barbados from boarding-school in England. Her racially obsessed father, her mother and her sister, all assume Sam will marry this very eligible white bachelor, the cream of society. But Sam has lost her heart to a bold young black farmer, Albert Wetherby, from the nearby village. The family butler cautions Sam against Albert, and against her clandestine meeting with her lover on the beach. But Sam's unlikely confidant, the gay antique dealer Roy, for whom she works, encourages her to follow her heart. And so when she inherits money from an aunt, Sam elopes with Albert on a boat back to England, far away from the small-minded, class-conscious community of Barbados. But trouble stirs almost as soon as they reach England. Gradually Sam comes to realise that Albert has his own agenda, and is not the loving husband that she thought he was.

The Author
Born in Barbados in 1931, Margaret Knight was educated in Barbados and England, excelling in gymnastics, tennis and swimming. A student nurse in London, she then trained as a secretary and joined Barbados Rediffusion. The first of her three marriages involved relocations to British Honduras and America, as well as much travel. Her second marriage, in London, brought her four children. Her third marriage took her back to Barbados, where she became a single working mother. She joined the Democratic Labour Party, and rose to the position of personal secretary to the late prime minister Errol Barrow. After Barrow's death, she continued to work for the new prime minister until her retirement in 1991. A natural writer, she was over many years a regular columnist for two Barbadian publications, and won first prise for her short story Tantie Rosita. Ginger Lily is her first novel.

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Full Circle: The Rami Johnson Story

Everard Palmer

Rami Johnson is the eldest son of a once wealthy Jamaican landowner, Sun-Sun Johnson who loses his money and eventually his house and land to a ruthless rival businessman, Jake Hibbertson. His parent's marriage breaks up under the strain and his mother, Arlene, marries Jake and gives birth to a son. The couple move back into the family home of Robin Hill.

Tragedy strikes one night when fire breaks out. Sun-Sun and Rami race to rescue Arlene and baby Jake but after saving them both it is too late for Sun-Sun to get back outside and he perishes in the flames.

This sequel to [b]My Father Sun-Sun [/b]Johnson is the life-affirming story of how Rami Johnson overcomes tragedy to rebuild his home and his life and restores his family's fortune.

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The Humming-Bird Tree

Ian McDonald
To the children of the village, Alan had everything, a big house, fine clothes, fancy food, birthday parties. But to Alan, it was the village children who had everything. Kaiser was a fund of knowledge and skills. He took Alan exploring along the river, showed him how to blow birds' eggs. Kaiser could make a catapult, he could drink rum and swear like a canecutter. He knew all about cockfighting. He was familiar with sex and death. While Jaillin was just as beautiful and tantalising as the marbleu butterfly Alan longed to catch. Alan was too young to understand why his parents preferred him to play with the other white boys on the estate. But gradually he learned that if he was going to meet Kaiser and Jaillin, he had to pretend he was going to meet someone else, he had to pretend he didn't enjoy spending time with his friends, he had to pretend he didn't mind when he wasn't allowed to invite them to his party. Sometimes, horribly, the pretending became real, and Alan found himself in betrayal of the friendship that meant so much to him.

Ian McDonald was born in Trinidad and was educated at Queen's Royal College, Port of Spain, and Cambridge University, where he earned his BA Honours degree in History, and later his MA. TT junior tennis champion for many years, he played at Wimbledon, captained for Cambridge, and was Guyana's 1957 Sportsman of the Year. In 1955 he joined British Guiana's Booker Group and made his career in the sugar industry until retiring as Director of Marketing and Administration for GuySuCo in 1999. In 2000 he became CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean. His poems and short stories have been widely published and anthologised, and his play The Tramping Man has been frequently staged. His award-winning The Humming-Bird Tree was first published in 1969, and in 1992 was made into a BBC film shot in Trinidad.

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Lutchmee and Dilloo
A Study of West Indian Life

Edward Jenkins


Begun in India, Dilloo and Hunooman's rivalry over Dilloo's wife, Lutchmee, is continued on a sugar estate in Guyana, where it leads to the planning of an armed rebellion among the indentured labourers and a tragic denouement.

Himself born in India, the author was a radical British politician who knew what was then British Guiana at first hand and was a stern critic of the injustices of the indentured labour system.

First published in 1877, this is the earliest novel of Indo-Guyanese life. It is a lively and readable story of a colonial society divided by antagonisms of race and class.

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The Sisters and Manco's Stories

Jan Carew

From the first day that the cruel and moody Queen Shanta ascended the Red Jasper Throne of Power, she had decreed that whenever she chose to visit the towns and villages of Ilora, all beggars, cripples and any living creature with the slightest deformity should be removed from her sight. The queen doted on her firstborn daughter, Elana, who had the rare beauty of a black narcissus. But then a second daughter was born. Marta was hunchbacked, cross-eyed and hideous. Only Prince Kayliss, Marta's father, understood her inner beauty. But through the intrigues of the evil sorceress, Osha, Kayliss was stolen away by Imanja, the Siren of the Iloran Seas. The two princesses were banished to the mountains, where they were raised by their wise and good grandmother, Old Etta. It was here that Marta learned to rise above her afflictions. And it was here that Elana's wilful ways led to her downfall. The Sisters is created out of the stuff of Guyanese folklore, a fusion of Amerindian and African mythology. Its companion piece, Manco's Stories, is a vivid retelling of some of the traditional legends.

Jan Rynveld Carew has led a rich and varied life as a writer, educator, philosopher and advisor to several nation states. He was born and educated in Guyana, and studied at Universities in America, Czechoslovakia and France. In London he worked as broadcaster, writer and editor with the BBC, and lectured in race relations. He has also lived in Mexico, Spain, Ghana and Canada. He is perhaps still best known for his first novel Black Midas (1958). Recent works include Rape of Paradise and Ghosts in our Blood

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There's No Place Like...

Tessa McWatt


Beatrice dreams of being discovered in Hollywood. And when her Aunt Mavis leaves her enough money to kick off Guyana's dust and fly to foreign places, it's to California she plans to go. But her beloved Aunt knew her fantasizing teenage niece better than Beatrice knows herself, and California is the one place she may not visit. Instead, Beatrice finds herself on an increasingly incredible trip around the world, discovering both the strange and the familiar wherever she goes, Miami, Mexico City, London, Paris, Beijing, Delhi, Nairobi. She discovers true friendship in the three young men who one by one join her travels: Irish rebel Sean, who is looking for courage; the Chinese juggler Christopher, who is looking for love; and little Deepak, who seeks wisdom. And Beatrice also has repeated encounters with three amazing women: the serenely beautiful Linda; the motherly Wambui; and the dangerously psychotic Cynthia, whose machinations threaten Beatrice's very life.

Tessa McWatt is a novelist, screenwriter, and librettist. She was born in Guyana and grew up in Canada. Her first novel, Out of My Skin, was published in 1998. Her second, Dragon's Cry, followed in 2000, when it was short-listed for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Governor General Awards of Canada. Victoria her third novel was published in 2004. She has had shorter pieces published in Canadian literary journals, and her performed work was set to music by a contemporary classical composer. She is the writer and producer of a film based on John Berger's novel, To the Wedding. She has taught literature and creative writing at institutions in London as well as in Canada. There's No Place Like … is her first work written specifically for teenaged readers.