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The Stranger Who Was Myself - Barbara Jenkins

TT$155.00

This is writing that displays wit, empathy, a questioning spirit, a vivid sense of place and an unerring capacity for finding the telling detail. This is a book that will offer enlightenment to Trinidadians about themselves and tell a story with universal resonances for many readers. Trade Paperback 278 pages Peepal Tree Press

The scope of the material takes the reader deep into both a personal story and one that throws so many different searchlights into the character of Trinidadian society through time.

'... She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women.'

'Barbara Jenkins’ The Stranger who was Myself is a beautifully written and crafted memoir of a childhood in Trinidad in the 1950s and a young womanhood in Wales through the 60s. Although it is a vivid and intimate account of a very particular life it is also a wonderfully realised social history, engaging with all those issues of gender, race, colonial politics, migration, language and class that are the stuff of more formal histories of the period. Barbara Jenkins weaves them into a compelling, poignant, often very funny narrative that makes those dry categories live in the flux and fluster of her relatives’ and friends’ lives. Everything Barbara Jenkins writes is measured and stylish, the narrating voice in The Stranger who was Myself manages to be both convincingly innocent and incredibly wise. She is a class act.'

Stewart Brown, editor The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories