Read Around North America Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in North America.
Best books from North America (2056)
751.
Only God Can Make a Tree by Bertram Roach EN
Country: North America / 
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
Adrian is the son of a black Caribbean woman and an Irish immigrant father, and is blessed with the pale skin and European features to allow him social mobility in the rigidly hierarchical society of twentieth-century Caribbean life. He falls in love, but is offered the opportunity to improve his social standing, and thus the rest of his life, if he can suppress his heart's desire and decide with his head. Will he choose Julia, the only woman he has ever really loved, and settle for being an overseer, or will he opt for the plantation- owner's daughter, Alice Mills, who could provide him with ... continue
752.
Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
In a vastly ambitious and intensely moving novel, the author of Cambridge creates a many-tongued chorus of the African diaspora in the complex and riveting story of a desperate father who sells his three children into slavery.
753.
Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams’ core that Phillip... continue
754.
Caribbean Chemistry: Tales from St. Kitts by Christopher Vanier EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
Charming and vividly evocative... I feel as if I have got to know these islands, and almost to have been there.' Helena Drysdale, author of Strangerland Ah, to be an embryo again. Christopher Vanier's story begins where we all do, conception. Set in 1940s and 1950s on the Caribbean island of St Kitts and beset by a troubled colonial legacy, both Christopher and his island yearn for independence. Vanier recalls the mischief of an island childhood: giving his baby brother to an ungrateful monkey, sneaking out to the cinema after school hours, hair-raising jaunts on a volcano, disastrous experime... continue
755.
The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson—cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner—and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Phillips intertwines her modern narrative with the childhood of one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys, as he deftly conjures young Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights, and his ragged existence before Mr.... continue
756.
The Final Passage by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
Trouble with her mother and her new husband convinces nineteen-year-old Leila to emigrate from her Caribbean island to England.
757.
758.
Cambridge by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
" ... A prim and increasingly apprehensive Englishwoman observing the peculiarities -- and barely veiled brutality -- of a sugar plantation in the nineteenth-century West Indies. A devout black slave whose profoundly Christian sense of justice is about to cost him his life ... As a suspenseful and inescapably damming portrait of the schizophrenia of slavery, Caryl Phillip's book belongs in the company of Beloved and The Confessions of Nat Turner." From the book jacket.
759.
A New World Order : Essays by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
The Africa of his ancestry, the Caribbean of his birth, the Britain of his upbringing, and the United States where he now lives are the focal points of award-winning writer Caryl Phillips’ profound inquiry into evolving notions of home, identity, and belonging in an increasingly international society. At once deeply reflective and coolly prescient, A New World Order charts the psychological frontiers of our ever-changing world. Through personal and literary encounters, Phillips probes the meaning of cultural dislocation, measuring the distinguishing features of our identities–geographic, racia... continue
760.
The Nature of Blood by Caryl Phillips EN
Country: North America / Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Description:
The Nature of Blood is an unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, about courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain yet absoulte necessity of human memory. A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood.