Augustown: A Novel [Paperback]

PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD FINALIST

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Slate • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. A teacher has cut off Kaia’s dreadlocks—a violation of the family’s Rastafari beliefs—and this single impulsive action will have ramifications that stretch throughout the entire community. Kaia’s story brings back memories from Ma Taffy’s youth, including the legend of the flying preacherman and his ties to the history of Jamaican oppression and resistance—all of which will reverberate forward to the present and change Augustown forever.

Vividly bringing to life Jamaica in the 1980s,Augustownfollows one family’s struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.“A deceptive spellbinder, a metafiction so disguised as old-time storytelling that you can almost hear the crackle of home fires as it starts. But then it gets you with twists and turns, it seduces and shocks you even as it wrestles with the very nature of storytelling itself. It’s the story of women haunted by women, and of the dangers of both keeping secrets and saying too much.”
—Marlon James, author of Man Booker Prize-winningA Brief History of Seven Killings


The richness and heft that is lost in the making of official accounts of the world is one of Miller’s favorite themes... Where the poet’s touch inAugustown becomes detectable is in the novel’s epigrammatic concision and in the loping, conversational cadence of so many of its sentences... The barely perceptible Caribbean lilt in Miller’s prose exerts a hypnotl“3