Search results for ""Author Diana McCaulay""

Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011.Dog-Heart is a novel about the well-meaning attempt of a middle-class single mother to transform the life of a boy from the ghetto who she meets on the street. Set in present-day, urban Jamaica, Dog-Heart tells the story from two alternating points of view – those of the woman and the boy. They speak in the two languages of Jamaica that sometimes overlap, sometimes display their different origins and world views. Whilst engaging the reader in a tense and absorbing narrative, the novel deals seriously with issues of race and class, the complexity of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change by their own actions."Diana McCaulay's debut novel Dog-Heart is a harsh and poignant tableau ... exploring the relationship between poverty, education, and crime, and tying those back to a national history of violence, violation, and wilful neglect. McCaulay, an environmental activist, submitted her then-unpublished manuscript to the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission's National Creative Writing Competition in 2008 and won the gold medal... The book is a passionate plea for child poverty alleviation couched in a laudable literary format."Lisa Allen-Agostini, Caribbean Review of Books

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It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital. Sorrel can take no more and she persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals, bitter enemies of the Domins, who have found ways of surviving in the hills, but she also knows they will have to evade the packs of ferals, animals with a taste for human flesh. Not least she knows that the sun will kill them if they can't find shelter. Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.

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Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at fifteen following her parents’ divorce. In the wake of her mother’s death fifteen years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. Her story is told against the background of two other McCaulays who arrived in Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries. As a white Jamaican, Leigh has to think about her own belonging.Back In Jamaica after years away, Leigh McCaulay encounters the familiarity of home along with the strangeness of being white in a black country, and struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history of white slave owners and black slaves.As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors – Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who comes to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ends up questioning the foundations of his beliefs.Part historical and part contemporary literary fiction, loosely based on the author’s own family history, Huracan explores how we navigate the inequalities and privileges we are born to and the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation in everyday contemporary life. But it is also the story of an island’s independence; of the people who came (those who prospered and those who were murdered); of crimes and acts of mercy; and the search for place, love and redemption.Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer, newspaper columnist and environmental activist. She has written four earlier novels, including Dog-Heart (2010) and Huracan (2012), published by Peepal Tree Press. Both books met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records. Her latest novel, Daylight Come, will be published in September 2020.

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Gone to Drift is an award-winning coming-of-age adventure story set in Jamaica. Life gets even tougher for Lloyd, a boy from a fishing village, when his grandfather goes missing at sea - 'gone to drift' as the local fishers say. Lloyd sets out to find him but no one will help except an uptown girl who studies dolphins, his best friend Dwight and - just perhaps - a mad man called Slowly on a sun-baked beach. Truth? Respect? Survival? Remembering what Maas Conrad had taught him about the old ways, Lloyd discovers that the enemies of the sea - and his grandfather - are closer to home than he could imagine.

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Collins Big Cat supports every primary child on their reading journey from phonics to fluency. Top authors and illustrators have created fiction and non-fiction books that children love to read. Book banded for guided and independent reading, there are reading notes in the back, comprehensive teaching and assessment support and ebooks available. Finny is a rare fairy fish living on a Caribbean coral reef. He has never seen another fairy fish, until one day he sees himself in a conch shell mirror and realizes he is different from everyone else. Finny believes he is ugly and worthless, but his friends persuade him to leave the reef and journey to the deep sea where an elder dolphin explains to him that difference it to be celebrated. Finny the Fairy Fish deals with themes of tolerance, belonging and celebration of diversity, using a Caribbean coral reef as the setting. The book introduces the types of creatures living on a reef and some of the threats facing the sea. It also encourages children to identify and talk about emotions. Purple/Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary. Ideas for reading in the back of the book provide practical support and stimulating activities.

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