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A Novel
by Diana McCaulay
Starring an unforgettably fierce ninety-nine-year-old Jamaican heroine, A House for Miss Pauline transports readers to the heart of rural Jamaica with a tender and urgent story about who owns the land on which our identities are forged.
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
"As it makes its points about the complex legacy of colonialism and recaps a century of life in rural Jamaica through the eyes of one fierce and enterprising woman, the novel educates and entertains. Alive with the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of Jamaica." —Kirkus Reviews
"McCaulay's masterful pacing keep readers turning the pages until the very end." —Booklist
"Where has Diana McCaulay been all my reading life? In this engrossing and glorious novel—reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas—prepare for full immersion in the world of Jamaica, not from a tourist's perspective but from the mind and heart and spirit of the unforgettable Miss Pauline, whose enslaved ancestors built the island that has historically dispossessed them. This is a profound and beautiful novel rich with encounters with the past and atonements in the present." ―Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies, How the Garcia Girls Got Their Accents, and The Cemetery of Untold Stories
"History's crimes unfurl in this magical story. Diana McCaulay's immaculate, breathtaking writing carries it with poise and conviction. This novel is poetry." ―Lisa Allen-Agostini, author of The Bread the Devil Knead
"Diana McCaulay is one of the Caribbean's finest writers. Her novels are building blocks of the current Caribbean canon and will be read for years to come." ―Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
This information about A House for Miss Pauline was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Diana McCaulay is a much-recognized Jamaican environmental activist and the award-winning author of five novels. Winner of the Gold Musgrave Medal, Jamaica's highest award for lifetime achievement across the arts and sciences; twice winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region (in 2022 and in 2012), she has also been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award, among other nominations, and is the winner of the Watson, Little 50 Prize for unrepresented writers aged 50+. Diana was born and lives in Kingston, Jamaica, is a founding editor of Pree, an online magazine for Caribbean writing, and is currently also working on an anthology of environmental writing.
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