My Books
Passiontide
Four women spark a revolution on a Caribbean island – the electrifying new novel from the Costa-winning author of The Mermaid of Black Conch.
Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel-pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.
As the days pass, this shocking event draws together new allies. There’s Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, a pink-haired, straight-talking local activist. Gigi, the ‘notorious’ founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago.
In a community in which women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked time after time, the group find themselves compelled to speak out – and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage…
The Mermaid of Black Conch
Winner, Costa Book of the year, 2020
Winner, Costa Novel Prize, 2020
Shortlisted, Goldsmiths Prize, 2020
Shortlisted, Rathbones/Folio Award, 2021
Shortlisted, Republic of Consciousness Prize, 2021
Also longlisted for the OCM Bocas Award, 2021, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the Ondaatje Prize.
April, 1976, St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch – but attracts a sea dweller he doesn’t expect. Aycayia, a beautiful young women cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by this man David and her song.
But her fascination is her undoing. She hears his boat’s engine again and follows it, and finds herself at the mercy of American tourists, landed on the island for the annual fishing competition. After a fearsome battle, she is pulled out of the sea and strung up on the dock as a trophy. It is David who rescues her, and gently wins her trust – as slowly, painfully, she starts to transform into a woman again. But transformations are not always permanent, and jealousy, like love, can have the force of a hurricane, and last much longer.
The Tryst
London, midsummer night. Jane and Bill meet the mysterious Lilah in a bar. She entrances the couple with half-true, mixed up tales about her life. At closing time, Jane makes an impulsive decision to invite Lilah back to their home. But Jane has made a catastrophic error of judgment, for Lilah is a skilled and ruthless predator, the likes of which few encounter in a lifetime. Isolated and cursed, Jane and Bill are forced to fight for each other, and, in doing so, discover their covert desires.
Part psychological thriller, part contemporary magical realism, The Tryst revisits the tale of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, to examine the secrets of an everyday marriage.
House of Ashes
Shortlisted, COSTA Award, Fiction, 2015
Shortlisted, OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature, 2015
Set on the fictional island of Sans Amen, this is the story of a botched coup d’état told from the point of view of a gunman and a hostage. Ashes, a spiritually ambitious and conscientious gunman, soon finds himself way out of his depth in the House of Power where a plan to overthrow the government backfires immediately. Aspasia Garland, a minister taken hostage, tries to keep her calm amongst the mayhem, and finds her mothering instincts help her survive amongst the boy soldiers. Breeze, a teenager swept up, survives the chaos and comes out of hiding decades later to confront his crime and ask questions about the nature of power.
Archipelago
Winner OCM BOCAS award for Caribbean Literature, 2013
Shortlisted, The Orion Award, 2014
Following a devastating flood in Trinidad, Gavin Weald, his six-year-old daughter Océan, and their elderly pit bull Suzy, take to the high seas on an old boat called Romany. They leave Port of Spain on a whim during rainy season, their destination a fantasy archipelago, the Galapagos. On their voyage west across the globe they sail through nine countries, most of them island states, picking up the capable skipper Phoebe, a fourth member of crew. As Gavin and Océan grieve their loss, they encounter the vastness of the sea and come to terms with the natural disaster which changed their lives in Trinidad. They arrive in the Galapagos a day before an earthquake erupts on the other side of the world, triggering a massive wave on course to hit the tiny archipelago, where they have safely anchored Romany.
The White Woman On The Green Bicycle
Shortlisted, The Orange Prize, 2010 and the Encore Award, 2011
This novel tells the story of Sabine and George Harwood, a French woman and a British man who arrive as newly-weds in Trinidad at the end of the colonial era. It is 1956 and Trinidad’s new and enigmatic leader Eric Williams has set up the PNM, the first popular people’s party, and is canvassing for votes and for change. Sabine listens to Williams’ speeches at the University of Woodford Sqaure, hears him proclaim Massa Day Done, and knows it is time to leave. George, on the other hand, plans to stay in Trinidad, forever. As Sabine recounts her early years, and confesses her secret letter writing habit to Eric Williams, the reader is drawn into her personal feelings of disillusionment about the many political failures of the island’s independence era.
With The Kisses Of His Mouth
After a broken love affair, aged forty-one, Roffey went in search of the rich and varied sex life she felt she deserved. Documenting her journey away from the heterosexual norm, Roffey explores the fringes of a more conscious and sex positive world. There are sex-soirees and sex clubs, tantric workshops, BDSM, a trip to the swingers’ resort in Cap D’Agde, a brief encounter with neo-native American sex practice known as Quodooshka and a pilgrimage to a sacred cave in the south of France where Mary Magdalene is said to have hidden after the crucifixion of her lover, Jesus Christ. The title of this memoir is taken from the first line of the Song of Solomon, and the memoir asks if this ancient all-embracing brother/lover type model of a love affair is too idealistic to achieve in the contemporary Western world.
Sun Dog
Set in a delicatessen in West London, sun dog tells the tale of August Chalmin, awkward, ginger-haired, fatherless and love-struck, who, one winter morning, wakes up covered in frost. Over the course of the following year, as the seasons change, and as he discovers the true story of his birth, his body slowly erupts in buds, blossoms and ultimately total hair loss. As August heals, as his body harmonises with the world around him, his past becomes resolved and love becomes possible. In this novel, cheeses talk, men dance alone, and somewhere a double sun in the sky, a trick of light known as a sundog, hints at a hidden identity.
