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 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.

The effects of historical tensions, class and climate change are laid bare in little-known Bermuda, bringing the islands to vivid life in this rich and absorbing novel as five characters come together to keep a young Black girl from incarceration.

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.

The Event of the anti-colonial struggle which began in the case of a then British Jamaica in the late 1930s, cut across the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the raison d'être of the first phase of her important body of work seen in this collection. The imperative of decolonizing the order of discourse that had legitimated the then imperial order (that is, to the colonizer as well to the colonized), gave rise to a theoretically sustained argument manifest here in a set of seminal critical and historical essays. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).Across this varied range of topics, a coherent and consistent thread of argument emerges from Wynter's oeuvre. In the vein of C. L. R. James, she placed the history of Spanish Jamaica (and therefore the Caribbean) in the context of the founding of the post-1492 European settler colonies in the New World, which remained an indispensable element in the first stage of the institutionalization of the Western world system. Therefore, a central imperative of her initial work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, but doing so, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative perspective of the settler archipelago, but rather more inclusively, from those of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and that of ex-slave (i.e. Negro) archipelagos; this latter, as what she defines, adapting Enrique Dussel's terms, as the "gaze from below" perspective of "the ultimate underside of modernity." Strongly influenced by Marx together with Black thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars (seen in the Jonkunnu essay), W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and with an appreciation of the insights brought by the New Studies of the Sixties (including that of Black redemptive co-humanist thought, feminism), Wynter's work has sought, from its origin, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate these knowledges, ones born of struggle.This volume makes an important contribution to restoring to view an essential strand in the 500-year emergent thought generated from the slave/ex-slave archipelago of the Caribbean and the Americas--thought important to what our increasingly integrated world-system, the first such in human history.