Leone Ross’ This One Sky Day is one of those novels that feels almost physically overgrown.

Set on the fictional Caribbean archipelago of Popisho, the book folds together mythology, eroticism, politics, ecology, gossip, weather, grief, food, memory and magic into something dense enough to feel humid. Everyone on the island possesses a particular gift or strangeness; sesire alters weather systems, shame leaks into the body. The landscape itself seems sentient and reactive.

Ross writes with extraordinary attention to appetite, colour, movement and bodily presence, but underneath all the lushness is a novel deeply concerned with inheritance, violence, colonial residue, class and emotional concealment. The island operates almost like a nervous system. Everybody touches everybody else’s weather eventually.

It also sits in an interesting lineage beside writers like Marlon James, Helen Oyeyemi, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and Karen Lord, while remaining stylistically very much its own thing. Strange, excessive, funny, erotic, occasionally grotesque. A book that trusts abundance rather than minimalism.

2021 Faber export paperback edition. Later printing. Appears in very good condition from photos, with minimal shelf wear.