Patsy
Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award 2020
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Nicole Dennis-Benn is a treasure.' Nikesh Shukla, author of The One Who Wrote Destiny
FROM AN AWARD-WINNING JAMAICAN NOVELIST COMES THIS BEAUTIFULLY LAYERED PORTRAIT OF MOTERHOOD, IMMIGRATION AND SACRIFICE
Patsy yearns to escape the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised for a new life in New York and the chance to start afresh. Above all, she hopes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, and to rekindle their young love. But spreading her wings will come at a price: she must leave her five-year-old daughter, Tru, behind. And Patsy is soon confronted by the stark reality of life as an undocumented migrant in a hostile city.
Expertly evoking the jittery streets of New York and the languid rhythms and lilting patois of Jamaica, Patsy weaves between the lives of Patsy and Tru as mother and daughter ultimately find a way back to one another. Daring, tender and profound, this is the story of one woman's fight to discover her sense of self in a world that tries to define her, and of the lasting threads of love stretching across years and oceans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Jamaican woman abandons her daughter for a chance to reunite with her childhood friend turned lover in this wrenching second novel from Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun). Adoring letters from Cicely, who left several years earlier, inspire Patsy to emigrate from Jamaica to America, but when she arrives in New York in 1998, her dreams of a romantic reunion are dashed by the discovery that Cicely has married an abusive husband. Forced to set out on her own, Patsy finds work as a bathroom attendant and a nanny. Meanwhile, Tru, her six-year-old daughter, is still in Jamaica under the care of her father, who helps to ease the girl's devastation by teaching her to play soccer, a game she excels at. Though Patsy has decided that "the absence of a mother is more dignified than the presence of a distant one," as she settles into a sustainable life over the next decade, Tru struggles with depression and self-harm. Patsy's ambivalence about motherhood transforms this otherwise familiar immigrant narrative into an immersive study in unintended consequences, where even the push Patsy's new girlfriend gives her to try and make amends, by sending a gift to Tru, leads to disaster. Out of that debacle, though, a chance for rapprochement appears, one that sets the stage for Tru to turn her athletic talent into the kind of life her mother is still grasping at. This is a marvelous novel.
