Books published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd

Featured title in The Big Jubilee Read. A haunting ghost story by Edgar Mittelholzer.

Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.

Olive Senior's new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice.

This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer's uncollected writings, compiled and edited by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.

Jacob Ross has been hailed as 'a writer of formidable technical range and emotional depth'.

From headless schoolgirls to talking food and threesomes, pretty much anything can happen in these short stories. Ranging in form from flash fiction to intense psychological drama, magical realism, horror and erotica, the stories can be serious, too.

The title of 'Wife' is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy, and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Their context is a

A breath of Caribbean fresh air, these poems are humorous, beautifully crafted, and perfectly pitched to their audience. These poems are enhanced by 20 illustrations, 3 in full color. A staple of the schools poetry anthology, John Lyon's poems never fail to stand out for their originality and exuberance.

From well-known and award-winning authors--including Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D'Aguiar, and Leone Ross--to previous unpublished writers, this ambitious and intriguing anthology of short stories showcases each author's most challenging work. These works from writers who are happy to describe themselves as Black British, have a rich variety of styles, forms, and themes, from raw realism, the erotic, and elegant economy, to the fanciful, humorous, and the tender. The contributors to Closure display a keen awareness of the short story form in all its contemporary possibilities as a way of telling and finding a form for the writer's vision. These are stories about the ways in which we do and do not love, unrequited yearnings, the quiet and often hidden violence in our lives, moments of epiphany, and the precious occasions of jubilation and uplift.

In her second collection of poetry, author Tanya Shirley uses a mixture of acute observation, outrage, and outrageousness to present stories that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness. Speaking honestly and powerfully about the experiences of women, these poems are written with a lyric and sensual attention to both the public and the private in the Caribbean

Drawing on dramatic monologue, historical narratives, poetry of witness, and an integral intimate-domestic voice, this compilation portrays a visceral emotive patchwork of everyday dramas in the fabric of ordinary life. Written by a poet whose sense of rootedness shapes the dimensions of her work, it delves into a multiplicity of places, characters, locations, landscapes, and languages. From Grenada to the Heathrow airport, these poems are interconnected in a larger diasporic story.

Originally published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins is a poignant portrayal of a man shaped by the colonial education of the Caribbean intellectual class. Orlando Patterson offers a devastating critique of middle-class intellectualism through the self-condemning perceptions of the main character, Alexander Blackman, and the vibrant reality of the world he is unable to embrace--the world of the Jamaican working class. An intensive and inward portrayal of what the world looks like to a man who has been shaped by the deeply entrenched consequences of colonialism, this novel is full of sardonic humor and a nihilism that emerges as a kind of integrity.

Word has spread that Seduce is dead, and mourners gather for her wake. But with Seduce in her coffin, her memories and consciousness of those around her persist. There are those like Hyacinth who have come to make sure that that "dutty filthy woman" has finally ceased to be the temptation of the husbands of decent, respectable women. Seduce's daughter, Glory, full of thwarted love and shame, hopes for yet fears the rescue of her mother's soul while her grandchildren, Son and Loo, both in different ways marked by their upbringing in a dysfunctional home, search to find something positive in Seduce's life for themselves. Even her former lover, Mikey, comes to make his peace. Set on the mythical Church Island in the Caribbean, upstanding sanctity and the vigorous life of profanity, the old ways and the new, fight over Seduce in the person of Pastor Collins and Seduce's old colleagues in the flesh, the Lampis. In this remarkable debut novel, told in nation-language prose that is poetic, delicate, vulgar, and slyly funny, Desiree Reynolds has powerful things to say about race, class, and the struggle between men and women.

What begins as a romantic tryst in a tropical setting quickly becomes, in this novel first published in 1938, an imaginative exploration of two opposing cultural and economic frameworks in the Caribbean--the dichotomy between the peasant plot, where cultivation and nature mingle, and the estate where land is simply an industrial resource. When Teresa Craddock rebuilds her life on an island resembling Dominica, she rediscovers lost passion by becoming involved with the new owner of an abandoned estate, Derek Morrel. Torn between her desires and the conflict of values with Morrel, the feisty, witty Teresa eventually comes to realize that Morrel's attitudes towards her body and the land are the same.

A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle--the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat--this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.

Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines th

This novel, set in a yard which is a microcosm of Kingston slum life, sets out as Mais himself said to give "a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful condition of the working classes."