Augustown: A Novel

ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017“A deceptive spellbinder, a metafiction so disguised as old-time storytelling that you can almost hear the crackle of home fires as it starts. But then it gets you with twists and turns, it seduces and shocks you even as it wrestles with the very nature of storytelling itself. It’s the story of women haunted by women, and of the dangers of both keeping secrets and saying too much.”— Marlon James , author of Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings "The richness and heft that is lost in the making of official accounts of the world is one of Miller’s favorite themes...xa0Where the poet’s touch in “Augustown” becomes detectable is in the novel’s epigrammatic concision and in the loping, conversational cadence of so many of its sentences...xa0The barely perceptible Caribbean lilt in Miller’s prose exerts a hypnotic effect that is one of the great pleasures of Augustown ...An expansive talent, of a writer stretching to catch up with his own curiosity and fertility...The center of the novel, Miller’s portrait of Augustown, holds." — Laura Miller , The New Yorker "Brilliant... Moving... Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem." —The New York Times Book Review "The structure of “Augustown’’ is pleasingly loose — a regular feature of novels written by poets, who seem to enjoy sauntering about once they’ve escaped the house of poetry...xa0Miller’s poetry provides memorable line after line...If anything maps the way to Zion, Miller suggests, it’s this continued witness to untold history, this attention to how the glimmer of the future might be seen in the past." — Thexa0Boston Globe "A deeply interesting historical novel, not least because it covers matters little-known beyondxa0Jamaica...Kei Miller’s considerable skills show vividly in his control of this back-and-forth narration...He is equally adept at characterization. Kaia is a lovely portrait of a little boy, andxa0Ma Taffyxa0is only the most important and lively of the people who seem to jump from his pages. Not least of the means used to power them is their Jamaican speech, sparkling with adjective and metaphor, inventive in syntax, studded with old words from England and Africa. Readers can almost see Kei Miller having fun writing this dialogue. Indeed, Augustown feels like a novel that its author enjoyed writing. It’s certainly a serious pleasure to read." —The Washington Times "Miller’s novel exhales the breathy immediacy of the here and now... Augustown offers a compelling variation on the theme that black lives matter...xa0As with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings , it demands [to] be heard." — Minneapolis Star Tribune "Augustown is a gorgeously plotted, sharply convincing, achingly urgent novel deserving widespread attention." —Booklist (starred review) "Miller captures the ways community, faith, and class create a variety of cultural microclimates." —Kirkus (starred review) “A rueful portrait of the enduring struggle between those who reject an impoverished life… and the forces that hold them in check… Miller infuses his lyrical descriptions of the island’s present with the weight of its history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Miller's new novel uses assured poetic language to create important historical intersections and strong, realistic characters... Highly recommended, and not just for lvoers of African and Caribbean folklore. This book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in fiction that's grounded in community." —Library Journal (starred review) “Set in the backlands of Jamaica, this is a magical and haunting novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the constraints of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Miller’s storytelling is moving, poetic, and inventive.” —Lisa Lucas, Page Turners for 2017, Martha Stewart Magazine “Miller’s writing has a cool immediacy [that] gives more than a nod to García Márquez… A vivid modern fable, richly nuanced and empathetic.” — The Guardian “The language is as clear as spring water, the characters are vividly drawn.”— The Observer “Miller’s storytelling is superb, its power coming from the seamless melding of the magical and the everyday that gives his novel a significant fabular quality.”— The Sunday Times (London) Kei Miller is the author of novels, poetry collections, and the collection Fear of Stones and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. In 2014, he won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. Born in Jamaica, he teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. First you must imagine the sky, blue and cloudless if that helps, or else the luminously black spread of night. Next—and this is the important bit—you must imagine yourself inside it. Inside the sky, floating beside me. Below us, the green and blue disc of the earth.xa0Now focus. 17° 59' 0" North, 76° 44' 0" West. Down there is the Caribbean, though not the bits you might have seen in a pretty little brochure. We are beyond the aquamarine waters, with their slow manatees and graceful sea turtles, and beyond the beaches littered with sweet almonds. We have gone inland. Down there is a dismal little valley on a dismal little island. Notice the hills, how one of them carries on its face a scar—a section where bulldozers and tractors have sunk their rusty talons into its cheeks, scraped away the brush and the trees and left behind a white crater of marl. The eyesore can be seen from ten or more miles away. To the people who live in this valley, it feels as if they wear the scar on their own skin—as if a kind of ruin has befallen them.xa0Seen from up here, the ramshackle valley looks like a pot of cornmeal porridge, rusting tin roofs stirred into its hot, bubbling vortex. Perhaps it is the dust bowls, the tracts of sand and the dry riverbed that give the place this cornmeally look. The streets run in unplanned and sometimes maze-like directions; paved roads often thin into dirt paths; wide streets narrow into alleys lined with zinc or scrap-board fences. If solid concrete houses rise like sentinels at the beginning of a road, the architecture will devolve into clumsy board shacks by the time you get to the cul-de-sac. If on one road the houses are separated into tidy lots, on the road just over they are crowded together and lean into each other as if for comfort. This is a community that does not quite come together. xa0We must imagine there was a time when all of this was beautiful and unscarred; a time when the hills were whole and green—verdant humps rolling up towards the Blue Mountain range above; a time when the valley was thick with guava trees, when wild parakeets flew above the forest and fat iguanas sunbathed on river-smoothed rocks. But that is all we can do. Imagine. There is no forest any more, and no more iguanas, and the mineral river that once flowed swiftly through the valley is now dammed up, its waters diverted to the city’s reservoir. Where there was once a perfect green hill, there is now a scar, and where there was once a river, there is now just a dry riverbed, little boys playing football among its vast sands. Where there once was beauty, now there is just “Augustown,” or sometimes “Greater Augustown” if you listen to the island’s city officials, who have seen fit to attach to it, like addendums, the nearby districts of Kintyre, Rockers, Bryce Hill, Dread Heights and “Gola. xa0Down there it is 11 April 1982, a day I have watched over and over again, as if from up here I could change things; could slip inside its hours and change the outcome. But I can only watch. xa0For here is the truth: each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exagxadgeration to say that every day contains all of history. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more