by Jamaica Kinkaid (Get the Book)A decade after her last novel, Mr. Potter (2002), Kincaid returns to fiction with a vengeance. Her urgent subject has always been her life in Antigua and America imaginatively and courageously transformed into a microcosm of the crimes, psychic pain, and social aberration unleashed in the fateful year of 1492. In this furious, funny, and sorrowful tirade and lament, Kincaid meshes autobiography with archetypes as the unraveling of an unlikely marriage turns into a heightened, hypnotic, and shrewdly complex inquiry into time, alienation, and metamorphosis. Mrs. Sweet, a wife, mother, gardener, and writer living in Vermont, loves and adores her children, no matter how much they baffle and exhaust her. Athletic Heracles surrounds himself with toy armies. Persephone is often hidden and out of reach. Kincaid's foray into myth is profound and unnervingly surreal as Mrs. Sweet is forced to recognize that small, brooding Mr. Sweet, a frustrated musician and composer, now hates her. The gathering storm of her rage, anguish, and regret propels her on a holy journey into her past and our collective history. Kincaid has created a measured, bewitching, and metaphysical fable, as well as a venomous, acidly comic, and plangent tale of love, betrayal, and loss that is at once slashingly personal and radiantly universal in its mystery, passion, and catharsis. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A national tour and publicity campaign will herald the publication of the first novel in 10 years by the distinctive, much-acclaimed, and fearless Kincaid. --Booklist
