An Autobiography of My Mother
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An Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age
Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is the black room of the world that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.
The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical poetry.
Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, My Favorite Plant (as editor), My Garden (Book), Talk Stories, and Mr. Potter. At the Bottom of the River won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was nominated for the PEN/ Faulkner Award. In 2000 she was awarded the Prix Femina Etranger for My Brother. Kincaid lives with her family in Vermont and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780374107314 |
| ISBN 10 | 0374107319 |
| Title | An Autobiography of My Mother |
| Author | Jamaica Kincaid |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc |
| Year published | 1996-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 228 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |