A Tall History of Sugar – Curdella Forbes

Condition : Good.
Canongate, 2020, Large-format paperback – Fiction – 366pp. ISBN 9781838850401.

A haunting, epic Caribbean love story, reminiscent of García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.

WINNER of the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction!
Shortlisted for the Fiction category in the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Shortlisted for the Kitschies Red Tentacle Award.

Discovered amidst a tangle of sea grape trees, Moshe Fisher’s provenance is a thing of myth and mystery; his unusual appearance, with blueish, translucent skin and duo-toned hair, only serves to compound his mystique. Equally feared and ridiculed by peers as he grows up, he finds a surprising kindred soul in the striking and bold Arrienne Christie, but their complex relationship is fraught with obstacles that tear them apart as powerfully as they are drawn together.

Beginning in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica’s independence from colonial rule, A Tall History of Sugar’s epic love story sweeps between a rural Jamaica, scarred by the legacies of colonialism, and an England increasingly riven by race riots and class division.

“A Tall History of Sugar is a gift for grown-up fans of fairy tales and those who love fiction that metes out hard and surprising truths. Forbes’s writing combines the gale-force imagination of Margaret Atwood with the lyrical pointillism of Toni Morrison.”
–New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
‘”Curdella Forbes’s A Tall History of Sugar is the most recent in an impressive new wave of novels by Jamaican writers–from Marlon James’s Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings to Kei Miller’s Augustown, Marcia Douglas’s The Marvelous Equations of the Dread, and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy, among others. Forbes provides an eclectic, feverish vision of Jamaican ‘history’ from the 1950s to the present glimpsed through the experiences of an abandoned mystic-child named Moshe, whose translucent skin and mismatched eyes defy racial category. Who he is and who he becomes–like the country itself–is a riddle that unfolds in episodic bursts and linguistic flourishes.”
–Vanity Fair, one of the Best Books of 2019
“An epic tale of two soulmates: Moshe Fisher, born with mismatched eyes and pale skin that bruises easily, and Arrienne Christie, ‘her skin even at birth the color of the wettest molasses, with a purple tinge under the surface.’ Arrienne is his protector at school–and later his lover–but how they eventually wind up together is part of this unconventionally crafted story that spans decades, from the years before Jamaica’s independence to the 2010s. Forbes’ sentences are the stars here; it’s a book that rewards slow, careful reading.”
–BuzzFeed, included in BuzzFeed’s Fall 2019 Preview

* Bundle option available for cheaper postage.