The Autobiography of My Mother

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What to expect

Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother.

Xuela’s vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to another household at the earliest opportunity; of her passion for the stevedore Roland, who fulfils her sexually but not intellectually; and of her husband, who provides her with status and a wealthy lifestyle but whom she is incapable of loving.

Poetic and disturbing, The Autobiography of My Mother is one of Kincaid’s most powerful statements of Afro-Caribbean women’s struggle for identity and independence, against a hostile backdrop of sexism and colonialism.

Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Critics Review

  • Fierce, incantory. . . lyrical. . . powerful and disturbing

    New York Times

  • Kincaid, always an elegant stylist, makes this story of a simple woman extraordinary…filling her prose with rich, poetic detail. . . An unforgettable account of singular survival

    San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  • A book that comes both to haunt and to dazzle us . . . [Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry

    Boston Sunday Globe

  • What a writer – elegant, uncompromising, simultaneously direct and layered and complex.

    Ali Smith

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