Longlisted: 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Bob Marley is dead. The Emperor Haile Selassie has been brutally murdered. The armed gangs of Kingston are at war and the murder rate soars. The people have lost all trust in self-serving politicians. It is hard to imagine worse times. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread tells the twin stories of Jamaica's nihilistic violence and its wondrously creative humanity and does truthful justice to both. It takes place in the worlds of the living and in the vivid afterlife of the dead, spanning the Kingston ghettoes, the Emperor's palace in Addis Ababa and Zion. There is even a fallen angel. At its heart are the human stories of the deaf Leenah who with her mother and daughter writes a powerful woman version of events; the relationship between Fall-down (the street madman and fallen angel) and Delroy the orphaned street-boy, and the meetings in the clock tower at Half Way Tree between Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey and the island's dead. There is also the enslaved boy who was hung from the silk cotton tree in 1766. The novel sets out to retrieve the word at the tip of his tongue. Not least of the novel's marvellous equations are the dread revenants who encourage the living to take responsibility for the future of the nation.

The ancestors have awakened. Somebody has called them. The long-dead are stirring. Jah ways are mysterious ways. “Is me—Bob. Bob Marley.” Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed. Jah ways are mysterious ways, from Kingston’s ghettoes to London, from Haile Selaisse’s Ethiopian palace and back to Jamaica, Marcia Douglas’s mythical reworking of three hundred years of violence is a ticket to the deep world of Rasta history. This amazing novel—in bass riddim—carries the reader on a voyage all the way to the gates of Zion.

Over the last few decades Caribbean writers - performance poets, newspaper poets, singer-songwriters - have created a genuinely popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. At the same time, even at its most literary, Caribbean poetry shares the vigour of the oral tradition. Writers like Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and many other exciting new voices, are exploring ways of capturing the vitality of the spoken word on the page. Both of these traditions are represented in this lively anthology, which traces Caribbean verse from its roots to the present.

""Writing is a cover for necromancy", Carmen Innocencia accuses her creator, Flamingo Tongue, a young Jamaican writer. Carmen is not the only one of Flamingo's creations to confront her author, for her characters and their tragic, heartening story come vividly alive, perhaps too alive, and just to make sure she can control them, Flamingo makes doll figures of them, but even then... There is Alva Donovan, blinded in childhood, with one seeing eye, one dreaming eye, with whom Flamingo exchanges shoes and in whom she begins to fear she will lose herself. There are the other members of the Donovan family: Dahlia, Paul aka Made in China, and their parents Mama Milly and Daddy Clive the bee-keeper whose sudden, violent deaths set up the patterns of separation and eventual reconnection and healing that run through the novel. As Carmen's accusation suggests, this is a novel set at the cross-roads between the living and the dead - and the cemetery literally becomes the refuge of the orphaned children - between the harsh realities of the violence which spills over from an election campaign and a world where dreams, spirit possession and women who become snails are just as real."--BOOK JACKET.

The search for a notorious serial killer takes a therapist on a nightmarish quest to an alternate world to find the sinister secret behind his crimes, in a dark fantasy inspired by Caribbean urban myth, from the award-winning author of The Blue, Beautiful World. “The natural heiress to Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin.”—Financial Times Dr. Miranda Ecuovo works as a forensic therapist, helping traumatized witnesses recover their memories so that they can testify about the crimes they observed. Her most famous case resulted in the conviction of the serial killer Walther Gray, a pathologist’s assistant known as the Butcher of the City. One day Miranda is seized by Chance, one of the spirits known as the Undying, and transported to a fantastical dreamlike world. There she is greeted by an Angel and presented with an unusual mission: Help catch the rogue Undying who was the true mastermind behind the Butcher’s crimes. Now Miranda and Chance must stop the murderer before he kills again. Together they will race through a surreal otherworld of magical labyrinths and wondrous spirits—but also into the maze of Miranda’s own memories when they retrace her original investigation. As Miranda draws closer to the truth, she finds herself confronted by even bigger questions than the killer’s identity. How could his victims’ deaths be forgotten so easily? And what can she do to create a world where the vulnerable can be safe and have their lives treated as precious?

Raphael is a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing...but somehow, miraculously, the novel seems to write itself. The Frequency of Magic traverses an array of lives connected to the village of Million Hills. There's the speculative imagination of Luke's travels through mythic landscapes pursued by his nemesis, the carnival figure of the Great Bandit. There's the psychological odysseys of the musician, a jazz saxophonist, and Ella, an actor, both long separated from Million Hills, working their ways across the USA and Europe. When the paths of these exiles cross, a love affair begins. Time in this richly ambitious novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. Above all, there is Raphael's belief that in the making of his fiction, however messy and disobedient its materials, art can both challenge the destructive passage of time and make us see reality afresh.

Marcia Douglas, who was born in England and grew up in Jamaica, presents poems beginning with the image of the voicelessness of the country people who witness the coming of lights to Cocoa Bottom but have no one amongst them to record the event. Each poem has its own poignant individually, but there is also a powerful sense of architecture which runs through the collection.

A novel whose protagonists are a group of Jamaican women. One is a shapeshifter, another a cleaner in New York, a third is in a lunatic asylum and a fourth is waiting to die. A first novel.

This collection's title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures.