Set in the heart of rural Jamaica, A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE (Algonquin Books), from award-winning author Diana McCaulay, tells the captivating, tender tale of Pauline Sinclair—a fiercely independent 99-year-old Jamaican woman who built her own home from the ruins of a plantation. As she faces her 100 th birthday, the old stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages, prompting her to reckon with long-buried secrets from her past. Lyrical, funny, eerie, and urgent, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE asks profound questions about ancestry, colonialism, and ownership of the places where our identities are forged.
Diana will share this really special moment of her first US publication with Maisy Card.
About Diana McCaulay
Diana is a much-recognized Jamaican environmental activist and the award-winning author of five novels. Winner of the Gold Musgrave Medal, Jamaica’s highest award for lifetime achievement across the arts and sciences; twice Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region (in 2022 and in 2012), she has also been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award, among other nominations, and is the winner of the Watson, Little 50 Prize for unrepresented writers aged 50+. Diana was born and lives in Kingston, Jamaica, is a founding editor of Pree, an online magazine for Caribbean writing, and is currently also working on an anthology of environmental writing.
About Maisy Card
Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in Portmore, Jamaica, and raised in Queens, NY. She’s currently a public librarian and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Newark, NJ. She is also a past BCLF guest judge.
Advance Praise for A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE
“What begins as one woman’s symphony of magic and loss soon unravels, stone by stone, secret by secret, until we’re left with nothing less than the brutal, turbulent, wild, and haunted history of Jamaica itself. Miss Pauline is the dazzling heroine of our times, a cypher for uncovering the secrets her world keeps hidden even as she hides her own. The center cannot hold, things fall apart, the past is uprooted, the present holds on by thread, and in the midst of it all is Miss Pauline, strong, conflicted, driven, and remarkable.” — Marlon James, Booker Prize–Winning Author of Moon Witch, Spider King
“History’s crimes unfurl in this magical story. Diana McCaulay’s immaculate, breathtaking writing carries it with poise and conviction. This novel is poetry.” — Lisa Allen Agostini, author of The Bread the Devil Knead