A House for Miss Pauline
A Novel
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When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
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"Where has Diana McCaulay been all my reading life? In this engrossing and glorious novel—reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas—prepare for full immersion in the world of Jamaica, not from a tourist's perspective but from the mind and heart and spirit of the unforgettable Miss Pauline, whose enslaved ancestors built the island that has historically dispossessed them. This is a profound and beautiful novel rich with encounters with the past and atonements in the present."Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and The Cemetery of Untold Stories
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"History’s crimes unfurl in this magical story. Diana McCaulay’s immaculate, breathtaking writing carries it with poise and conviction. This novel is poetry."Lisa Allen-Agostini, author of The Bread the Devil Knead
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"Diana McCaulay is one of the Caribbean’s finest writers. Her novels are building blocks of the current Caribbean canon and will be read for years to come."Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
- On Sale
- Feb 25, 2025
- Publisher
- Hachette Audio
- ISBN-13
- 9781668646212
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