Annie John

Since her first, prize-winning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her "prophetic power" and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said: "No one else seems to be writing quite this way right now." With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of all her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this novel, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.