Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Autobiography of My Mother

The Autobiography of My Mother

Kincaid, Jamaica

Paperback

Series: FSG Classics

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1250322405
ISBN13: 9781250322401
Publisher: Picador USA
Published: Jan 28 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaid's 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 prose.

This novel tells 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 fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is the black room of the world that is Xuela's motherlessness and barrenness.

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