Search Results: Authors starting with K from Oasis in the Diaspora

Pantheon Books, 1998. 1. Good. Jackie Kay's mesmerizing and powerfully moving first novel is about the extraordinary life and seeming dissolution of a family -- about the boundaries of identity and the essential nature of love. At its center is Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpeter who created music that convinced everyone who heard it that they knew the man who made it. But Joss's death has proved them all wrong: Joss Moody lived his life inside a stunning secret. His wife, Millie, had known about it. But their adopted son, Colman, now in his thirties, has just learned of it. With everything he understood about himself and his family thrown into question, Colman forms an uncomfortable alliance with a journalist intent on telling Joss's story her own way. Millie, grieving and besieged by the press, secludes herself in their home in a small Scottish village, sinking into the aching solace of memory. Their two brilliantly realized voices -- one revisiting the past for comfort, the other for… Read More

Dutton, 1999. 1st. Fine. The time is the 1970s. The place is the coast of Guyana, a world of color and light, dust and heat, flesh and earth. Here in the cool, wood-floored home that doubles as a school and a community center, a young girl opens her window and breathes in the redolence of a Buxton Spice mango tree. And asks the tree to tell her its secret - and the secret of its indifference. Buxton Spice is the song of Oonya Kempadoo's young narrator, Lula, and the song of her ill-fated town of Tamarind Grove: its colorful inhabitants, its eccentric families, its sweeping joys and sudden tragedies. Here are the mud-red banks where Lula and her friends slide down into the milky tea water of the Broadie Canal. Here is the emerging sexuality of young girls who can see what the madness of desire - and men - can reap. And here, in a village torn between cultures, between the future and the past, will come an explosion of politics and violence ignited by the eternal human dividers of race, money, and… Read More

Macmillan, 2002. 1st. Fine. The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations--newly available in paperbackLucy, 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, alomst at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is. At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis's and Mariah's lives, she is also unravelling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character possessed with… Read More