“A jeremiad of great clarity and force that one might have called torrential were the language not so finely controlled.”

“Ms. Kincaid writes with…a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.”

“A rich and evocative prose that is also both urgent and poetic…Kincaid is a witness to what is happening in our West Indian back yards.”

“Wonderful reading…Tells more about the Caribbean in eighty pages than all the guidebooks.”

“In truly lyrical language that makes you read aloud, [Kincaid] takes you from the dizzying blue of the Caribbean to the sewage of hotels and clubs where black Antiguans are only allowed to work…Truth, wisdom, insight, outrage, and cutting wit.”

“Kincaid continues to write with a unique, compelling voice that cannot be found anywhere else. Her small books are worth a pile of thicker—and hollower—ones.”

Kincaid’s essay about her home island of Antigua is honest, sharp, and
beautiful…It’s the best kind of place-based writing: complicated and
many-layered. Kincaid articulates many truths—about racism and resort
communities and the things that visitors often chose not to see about places
they visit—in a short and very readable book.”

“This electrifying work is a new classic in the literature of hate—and of love, for a tortured land and for the possibility, albeit dim, of changing things.”

“Kincaid…asks us to grasp the crime of empire in a new way, stressing that it can be understood only from a post-colonial point of view.”