Books published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd

J. Vijay Maharaj invents the hidden life of Leila Ramsumair, the mostly silent wife of the Ganesh Ramsumair, the protagonist of V.S. Naipaul's satire on Trinidadian Hinduism, The Mystic Masseur.

This anthology creates a dichotomy between the comfortable and the mysterious, providing a glimpse into hidden worlds and human nature; tantalizing in its mystique and refreshing in its insight into the minds of these exceptional Black British writers. Published under the Inscribe imprint of Peepal Tree Press, and edited by Leone Ross.

The long-awaited debut of a seasoned poet that speaks to the splendid tensions and graces of an immigrant's imagination and language, rooted in her Trinidad birthplace, and her uneasy American home. Her poems range across three ways of seeing: the ode finding beauty in the unexpected; the mythologizing of daily life; and her lyric poems of healing.

This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut, set in India, Trinidad and Tobago, England, and St Lucia, centres on a privileged but dysfunctional family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender.

In this memoir, the celebrated novelist and retired teacher Barbara Jenkins writes with wit, vividness and insight of growing up in colonial Trinidad, a migrant life in Wales, and her return to Trinidad with her husband and first child in the post-independence era.

unHistory is an essential record of our times by two world-leading poets, it is much more than that. It is an exploration of history's undertones, its personal, familial and institutional resonances and of the relationship between public events and the literary imagination.

In musical, evocative language, her poems imagine the what-if-that-almost-was of Scotland's best-loved Bard, following Robert Burns into the life he might have lived as a plantation overseer in Jamaica-then seeing his enslaved granddaughter come back to Scotland to claim a life reserved for white women. Evie Shockley This collection is timely and timeless as it reframes the complicated genealogies created by colonialism. Erasure is one of the colonizer's most insidious tools and McCallum's gorgeous monologues serve to reclaim the voices ignored, unsaid, and unclaimed because of colonialism. Adrian Matejka A subtle, multi-layered verse narrative... The worlds it vividly presents beget reflections on creativity, history, slavery, race and many other issues. It is an exceptional work, a memorable achievement. Mervyn Morris Seemingly controlled words surge with echoes; poems keep double-entry accounts, striping the page, laddering like stockings. McCallum achieves an un-haunting. Characters are realer than real, less imaginary than re-storied. Like the returning dead, whom nothing 'will quench or unhunger', this work wants you, wants us, 'to begin again'. Vahni Capildeo

Glory Dead is a beautifully written account of the visit of a young English communist to Trinidad in 1938 to investigate social conditions and meet the radicals who were challenging British colonial government. This title is part of the Caribbean Modern Classics Series.

Jennifer Rahim explores the power of the imagination to confront the restrictions of the year of the pandemic through reflections on history and the capacity of language to give immediacy and presence to absent place. Rahim is a former winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize, and the OCM Prize for Caribbean Literature.

This collection explores the fragile territory between remembering and forgetting, both as an individual experience and in the life of a society. If in the end all is subject to âEURœtimeâEUR(TM)s slow bleedâEUR?, these poems enact the capacity of the imagination âEURœto pass through ancient wallsâEUR? and to reorder failures long gone in time into more hopeful connections. Poems recreate those childhood moments when physical presences, such as the âEURœgreat houseâEUR? at Drax Hall provoke the âEURœbeginning of poetryâEUR?, the searching for what is âEURœhidden in the darkâEUR?, and thence to a grasp of the history that society would rather forget. For while forgetting is human, the collection also explores how amnesia can be cultivated in society as a means of hiding the sources of contemporary privilege and economic power. Poems such as âEURœCanvasâEUR? (about the images from English and American magazines that patch up the hangings in an old womanâEUR(TM)s âEURœtumbledown dwellingâEUR?) not only picture children âEURœtiptoe at the rim of the worldâEUR? but, without needing to say it, show those children as far more familiar with GarboâEUR(TM)s âEURœbright blue eyes/ and shiny red lipstickâEUR? than with the history and meaning of Drax Hall. If there are echoes of WalcottâEUR(TM)s poem where âEURœall in compassion endsâEUR?, Phillips is no less compassionate, but much readier to see âEURœHistoryâEUR(TM)s wound still bleeding / to its last dropâEUR? âEUR" a wound extending down to a powerful poem in memory of George Floyd. If the collection calls out âEURœSpeak, stones, bear witness!âEUR?, poems also pay tribute to those who in the rural village memorialised the lives of the unconsidered poor, who, like the village historian, Miss Lewis, speaks across the years into contemporary urban life âEURœto remind me who I amâEUR?. Esther PhillipsâEUR(TM) poems are always lucid and musical; they gain a rewarding complexity from being part of the collectionâEUR(TM)s careful architecture that offers a richly nuanced inner dialogue about the meaning of experience in time. Not least powerful in this conversation are the sequence of poems about Barbadian childhoods, poems of grace, humour and insight. When Barbados chose Esther Phillips as its first poet laureate it knew what it was doing: electing a poet who could speak truth, who could challenge and console her nation âEUR" and all of us.

Based on true events, Fortune is a compelling and beautiful story of love, ambition, oil and fate set in 1920's Trinidad.

Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial connections of country houses and public spaces.

A wonderful collection of essays by inspiring Trinidadian poet and journalist, Andre Bagoo.

A stunning new collection from Nii Ayikwei Parkes, featuring poems that embrace play, love and the ephemeral such as water bodies, blood/heritage, history, and gossip.

Motherland and Other Stories is a collection of short stories from an exciting new voice that explores the experiences of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in America and England.

Writing both of imagined characters and as "I", Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's stories deal with the experiences of loss, disappointment and the attempt to be self-truthful.

The Sea Needs No Ornament/ El mar no necesita ornamento is the first bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by women writers of the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its Diasporas to be curated in more than two decades.

Daylight Come is set on an island where it's so hot that everyone sleeps in the day and works at night. The teen protagonist, Sorrel, and her mother must leave their current home to try to gain access to cooler air in the mountains in a journey fraught with danger.

Road Trip is a striking first collection by a poet with illuminating and entertaining stories to tell, and an accomplished craft in using traditional and contemporary forms. As a poet of Jamaican heritage, born and raised in north London and now working as a teacher, father of mixed race children, living in south Wales, Marvin Thompson brings together all those passages of place and time in fresh and revealing ways. He explores the underbelly of race and empire in uncovering and inventing stories of his father's time in the British army. He writes with feeling of the post-industrial landscape of Wales and wonders whether this is a place he can bring up his children - though one should never assume that Thompson's poems are factually true. He uses sonnet, adapted villanelle and sestina sequences to tell utterly contemporary stories. Thompson has a refreshing, curious and honest eye that transforms and illuminates the everyday into something special and unique, but also a convincing vision of possibility.