Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco is a novel built out of oral tradition, tracing the making of a Martinican community from slavery and plantation life through emancipation, migration and the pressures of modernisation.

At its centre is Marie-Sophie Laborieux, who recounts the history of her family and the settlement of Texaco itself, but the book continually exceeds the frame of a single life, combining into a sort of social archive.

Chamoiseau’s prose is dense, polyphonic and rhythmically unstable, mixing Creole-inflected speech, lyric narration, folklore, political history and bureaucratic fragments. The novel is deeply concerned with how a people survives systems designed to erase, organise or assimilate them, and with the city as both violence and possibility. Originally published in French, from Creole, in 1992, Texaco is one of the major novels of Caribbean postcolonial literature: formally unruly, historically saturated, and suspicious of any account of identity that arrives too clean.

Granta Books, London, 1998. Granta paperback edition; first published in Great Britain in 1997. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor corner creasing; internally clean and sound. Translated from the French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov.