New Releases by Rachel Manley

George was a charter member of the JetSet of the 60s and 70s flying off to the Caribbean and back to London on a whim. But who was he in his private life?

The recipient of a prestigious Gunter Fellowship, Jessica leaves behind Jamaica, the only country she’s ever known, for Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the end of the twentieth century. In her fellowship year, she is to write a memoir about her father, a professor of mathematics at the University of the West Indies. Attuned to watching for meaning below the surface of things, Jessica learns about the women with whom she shares her year, twenty women, all in middle age, all accomplished — considerably more accomplished than her slim volumes of poetry and one memoir allow her to feel. Amidst the academic, artistic, and scholarly life of the Gunter Center, Jessica finds comfort and solace in a deepening friendship with her landlady, a retired economist whose life story she hears and records over the course of her fellowship year.

Friends since attending university in Jamaica, Lethe and Daniel have long realized they would never be good for each other. But Lethe is Daniel's muse, and theirs is a connection that proves unbreakable as they spend the next thirty years crisscrossing the Caribbean and travelling the world in search of work, love, and home. Now, Daniel has become an internationally renowned prize-winning poet, and Lethe aspires to be a writer in her own right. His invitation to her to join him at an isolated retreat, Peacock Island, gives them both a chance to reflect on the life they've shared. The debut novel by Governor General's Literary Award-winning author Rachel Manley, The Black Peacock is the story of two unforgettable characters, adrift on the ever-changing tides of the Caribbean, who are united by something less than passion but more than love.

There is a statue outside a courthouse in Kingston, Jamaica. Paul Bogle, a church deacon who fought in the slave rebellion of 1865 and was hung for his efforts, stands with his arms akimbo, a sword, like a cross, held flat against his chest. The figure, which towers some fifteen feet above the square, was created by Edna Manley. Born on England's cold and rocky Cornish coast, Edna Manley came to Jamaica in 1922. She travelled with her husband, Norman, her newborn son, a set of sculpting tools and an insatiable curiosity about the island of her mother's birth. As the wife of a National Hero and mother to the island's fifth prime minister, Edna's life was inextricably linked with Jamaican politics. But she was destined to leave her own mark on her adopted country. Her legacy-much less easily defined, perhaps than either her husband's or her son's-can be seen and heard and read. It is firmly entrenched in the island's art, in its sculpture and painting and poetry and prose. She was, some say, nothing less than the mother of Jamaica's artistic soul. In Horses in Her Hair , Rachel Manley-Edna's granddaughter and an award-winning author-tells the remarkable story of her grandmother's life. Completing the trilogy that began with Drumblair and Slipstream , Horses in Her hair is the story of both a family and a nation, an intimate and exquisitely crafted portrait of the woman who left such an indelible mark on each.

Michael Manley, the charismatic, three-term Prime Minister of Jamaica, stood at the heart of a turbulent decade as his country came of age in the 1970s. In the wake of her beloved father's death, Rachel Manley turned inward to try to understand the lessons of his life - a life which cast a long shadow over her own. But we see him as any daughter sees her father: as a giant of a man, though of course flawed, and an inspiring yet ordinary dignitary. This is the story of one man's enormous determination to change the world - and the story of a woman who found strength from him.

In the wake of her beloved father's death, Rachel Manley turned inward to try to understand him and to explore the impact of those final moments. Michael Manley, charismatic, controversial prime minister of Jamaica, had stood at the heart of a decade of radical social reform in the 70s. From the vantage of her father's bedside during his last six months of life, his daughter searches the shadows that he cast on her as a child and as a woman - the shadows that familiarly touch daughters and fathers but are inevitably thrown more fiercely by famous parents over their children. With honestly and deep feeling she shares her love and pain, and explores how the enduring bonds that held them were tested time and again, not only by the ordinary conflicts of family life but by the heavy demands of the political arena and by a succession of five marriages. "The Slipstream "is a shining portrait of one man's enormous heart and undying spirit, and a testament to the ways in which courage and love can inspire us all to soar.

Rachel Manley's poems explore loss and grief in a life-enhancing way. They confront this most universal of experiences with an exactness to feeling, in language which is simple on the surface and complex in its depths. Death is no terrifying abstraction, but part of life and love, humanised through its associations with the particular. Life is always present in the richly evoked Caribbean world. "Enchanting... like Chopin preludes." Louis Simpson "A Light Left On... reveals the rich lyricism of her verse, the musicality of her voice, and the clarity and enduring optimism of her vision." The Caribbean Writer Rachel Manley was born in Jamaica in 1947. Her father was the late Prime Minister, Michael Manley, her grandparents Norman and Edna Manley. She is the author of the prize-winning Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1996).