Jamaica Kincaid’s first book is made up of ten pieces move through childhood, domestic life, colonial inheritance, fear and sexuality

Events arrive through repetition, image and sensory pressure, with language that's incantatory and sharply controlled. Throughout, imagery of houses, rivers, gardens, beds and bodies repeatedly shift between the ordinary and the mythic. Kincaid writes from Antigua without turning place into scenery; colonial power has entered the voice, the family and the child’s developing sense of reality. The title novella gathers these tensions into something stranger and more elemental, dissolving the boundary between self and world.

This is the Kincaid for readers drawn to Lispector, Woolf and the prose-poem tradition: formally compressed, emotionally severe and difficult to paraphrase without killing it.

Vintage, 1997. Paperback. Moderate cover and edge wear, including creasing and a small closed tear at the upper corner; small ink mark to title page. Binding sound.