Curdella Forbes Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Curdella Forbes is a bestselling Jamaican American author of historical fiction books best known for her 2019 novel titled A Tall History of Sugar. She has worked at Howard University as the lecturer of Caribbean literature and has also been a writer in residence at University of West Indies. She lives in Takoma Park and is a professor at Howard University.

A Tall History of Sugar

In her recent novel, A Tall of History of Sugar Curdella Forbes tells of a haunting but exciting Caribbean love story, comparable to Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. This book tells the tales of Moshe Fisher, a man considered born “with no skin” so that no one knows his true race and Arrienne Christie, his soul mate, who makes it her duty in his life to protect him from emotional and social consequences of his strange appearance.
The story begins with Moshe’s birth in the late 1950s, a few years before Jamaica’s independence from their colonial masters, and ends in an era that the author refers as the “fall of empire” the era of Donald Trump and Brexit. The historical trajectory in the story layers but never overwhelms the beautiful love story as the two fights recreate their view of love/romance, against the moral ethics of the colonial plantation and its heritage that continue to haunt their lives and those around them.

Written in lyrical prose that stretches the range of Jamaican Englishes A Tall History of Sugar is a remarkable tale about a couple’s strange love affair from their childhood to adulthood, from the tormenting environs in rural Jamaica to the city of Kingston, and the miles away to England- another tormented location in Curdella Forbes’s rendition.

Songs of Silence

In her latest novel Songs of Silence, Curdella Forbes has beautifully crafted tales of observations of life in undeveloped Jamaica, as seen through the eyes of a young girl, the main character. United together by the voice of a child, this collection is intermixed with the whisper of mature reflection, rendering the account at once both gratifying and adorably honest.

Inhabiting in isolated space between what said and what’s felt, what is perceived and what is conveyed, silence songs of silence becomes a metaphor of fear and rage, loneliness and contentment, uncertainty, and clarification in the songs that explore individual growth and social change. Rotating between Standard English and Creole, Songs of Silence is a well-written piece of writing famed by an extraordinary sophistication of language sophistication and stylistic confidence. Narrated with rare detail and intimacy, recollections are translated into different tales in which the narrator acts as mouthpiece for multiple voices, each with their own distinct story to tell. This book comprises eight linked episodes, all which focus on different members of a community in Jamaica, seen through the eyes of a young girl who’s remembered by the adult she became.

From Nation to Diaspora

From Nation to Diaspora is a story that shows works of two West Indian authors; George lamming and Samuel Selvon in the first treatment of gender. The novel makes it clear about the discourses of nationalist and creolization, showing how they have covered gender inequalities in west India. The coverings are part of the larger masking of the threads of neocolonialism within nationalism.

The author applies the fictions of Lamming and Selvon in West Indian society’s thoughts and practices to show that gender is foundational in the West Indian revolutionary actions. This is a fact that is paid attention to in the feminist action and other the conventional discourses. These West Indian’s views on gender are used by revolutionary poetics in their culture during liberations but are compromised by the nationalists of the 1950s to 1970s.The novel shows how these discourses are playing vital roles in the lives of people of west India. The author connects fictions of lamming and Selvon and nationalism of western India into a conversation having the concepts of postmodernism and diaspora. She also raises the issues that have affected formation and representation of gender identities. Curdella Forbes later considers the results of these discourses to have affected the identity and survival of people in west India in a neocolonized and postmodern world.