At the Bottom of the River

In this extraordinary collection of ten stories, Jamaica Kincaid plunges us into an intensely physical world, partly remembered, partly divined: a childhood in the Caribbean-family, manner, and landscape-transformed by her haunting, visionary style. It is a world of lush growing things, the lilting rhythms of work and play, the dangers of supernatural women called jablesses, and the ghosts of people long gone. Kincaid vividly captures the experience of growing up in this exotic, paradoxical paradise, where sensuality, fierce emotion, and poverty coexist uneasily with teatime, churchgoing, and British grade-school texts about frostbitten chimney sweeps. Anne Tyler has called Kincaid’s prose “beautiful to listen to,” and once again Jamaica Kincaid’s voice, heard as clearly here as in her novels, sings not only with music, but with strange and wonderful meaning.