Here Comes the Sun
'Stuns at every turn' - Marlon James
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'My favourite book of all time' Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie
A finalist for the New York Public Library Fiction Award
A Grand Prix Littéraire of the Association of Caribbean Writers Selection
Named a Best Book of 2016 by: New York Times, NPR, Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, Book Riot, Kirkus, Amazon, WBUR's 'On Point' and Barnes & Noble
In this radiant, highly anticipated debut, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village.
Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate.
When plans for a new hotel threaten the destruction of their community, each woman – fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves – must confront long-hidden scars. From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A stormy family lives through Jamaica's early 1990s drought in Dennis-Benn's first novel. Delores sells trinkets at a tourist market; her daughter Margot, whom Delores pimped out when Margot was very young, now works as a front desk clerk at a hotel. Margot turns tricks after hours to make extra money to pay her much younger sister Thandi's tuition at a Catholic school. Margot's romantic yearning is directed towards Verdene, a rich woman considered a witch by their village because she is a lesbian. Thandi, the unhappy recipient of her family's hopes, feverishly tries to bleach her skin white and to resist her attraction to her childhood friend Charles, whose poverty would impede her quest for upward mobility. The novel, with its knife fights and baroque blackmail schemes, often threatens to stray from operatic intensity to soap opera melodrama. But Dennis-Benn redeems it with her striking portrayal of a vibrant community where everyone is related and every action reverberates, and her unstinting description of how shame whips desire into submission.
