Annie John

Annie John, the headstrong, brilliant heroine of Jamaica Kincaid's bestseller, is a child of Antigua but an adolescent of the whole world. Her passage into young adulthood the tumultuous love of her mother and their gradual separation is a story that will speak to listeners of all ages. Internationally acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid has written a true contemporary classic, this generation's Catcher in the Rye.

The essential, urgent coming-of-age novel by Jamaica Kincaid, a reinventor of the form.

Since her first, prizewinning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid’s work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her “prophetic power” and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said, “No one else seems to be writing quite this way.”

With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother’s love. In this book, written in Kincaid’s lucid, elemental style, Annie John’s ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.