Read Around North America Challenge

Read at least one book by an author from each country in North America.

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Best books from North America (2095)
751.

Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers EN

0 Ratings
Description:
On the streets of Brooklyn in the 1970s, Veronica Chambers mastered the whirling helixes of a double-dutch jump rope with the same finesse she brought to her schoolwork, her often troubled family life, and the demands of being overachieving and underprivileged. Her mother—a Panamanian immigrant—was too often overwhelmed by the task of raising Veronica and her difficult younger brother on her meager secretary's salary to applaud her daughter's achievements. From an early age, Veronica understood that the best she could do for her mother was to be a perfect child—to rewrite her Christmas wish li... continue


753.

Only God Can Make a Tree by Bertram Roach EN

Rating: 3 (1 vote)
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

754.

Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips EN

Rating: 3 (1 vote)
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.

755.

Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips EN

0 Ratings
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

756.

Caribbean Chemistry: Tales from St. Kitts by Christopher Vanier EN

Rating: 3 (1 vote)
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

757.

The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips EN

0 Ratings
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

758.

The Final Passage by Caryl Phillips EN

0 Ratings
Description:
Trouble with her mother and her new husband convinces nineteen-year-old Leila to emigrate from her Caribbean island to England.


760.

Cambridge by Caryl Phillips EN

0 Ratings
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.


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