'In this thrilling debut collection Alexia Arthurs is all too easy to love.' Zadie Smith
'Impressive' Observer
'A summer must-read' Stylist
One of Oprah Magazine's 15 Favourite Books of 2018.
`There is a way to be cruel that seems Jamaican to me.'
Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection of short stories, How to Love a Jamaican, about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and Midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.
In `Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands', an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In `Mash Up Love', a twin's chance sighting of his estranged brother - the prodigal son of the family - stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In `Bad Behavior', a mother and father leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In `Mermaid River', a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In `The Ghost of Jia Yi', a recently murdered international student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in `Shirley from a Small Place', a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother's big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital.
The winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for `Bad Behavior', Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction's most dynamic and essential young authors.