My new novel, Jessamine, will be out in June as an ebook. Jessamine is the story of Grace Hylton, an African-American, who arrives on the Caribbean island of St. Crescens full of doubts about her husband’s political aspirations, doubts about her marriage and doubts about the wisdom of relocating. Her native-born husband, Julian, has lived most...
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My new novel, Jessamine, will be out in June as an ebook. Jessamine is the story of Grace Hylton, an African-American, who arrives on the Caribbean island of St. Crescens full of doubts about her husband’s political aspirations, doubts about her marriage and doubts about the wisdom of relocating. Her native-born husband, Julian, has lived most of his adult life in the States but has come back to St. Crescens, determined to pull his country out of the cauldron of corruption, nepotism and crime into which the leading political dynasty has taken it.
An architect by training, Julian buys and restores Jessamine, an old Great House. What the Hyltons don’t know is that Jessamine is home to the ghost of Arabella Adams who lived there as a governess during the late 1800s.
Jessamine is told from the alternating viewpoints of the two women – both foreigners, both married to local men. An old injustice binds them across the century that separates them but can Grace discover its roots before St. Crescens is plunged into violence and chaos? (St. Crescens is a fictional island but the events that take place in Arabella’s time are based loosely on the turbulence that rocked several Caribbean societies after emancipation in 1834.)
In 2001, Greenwood Press published my history of women, From the Field to the Legislature, which was based on my master’s thesis from the University of the West Indies, Barbados. My two previous works of fiction are Dido's Prize and Just an Affair. My short stories have appeared in various issues of “The Caribbean Writer.”
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