Broughtupsy : A Novel

Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akua flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister Tamika. Their younger brother Bryson has recently passed from sickle cell anemia - the same disease that took their mother ten years prior - and Akua carries his remains in a small wooden box with the hope of reassembling her family. Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akua and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood, but time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad have distanced Akua from her home culture. ''Am I Jamaican?'' she asks herself again and again. Beneath these haunting doubts lie anger and resentment at being abandoned by her own blood. ''Why didn''t you stay with me?'' she wants to ask Tamika. Wandering through Kingston with her brother''s ashes in tow, Akua meets Jayda, a brash stripper who shows her a different side of the city. As the two grow closer, Akua confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means. By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savour the feeling of home?