Algonquin Books is thrilled to share that Diana McCaulay’s A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE is the 2025 CARICON Prize for Fiction Winner. The novel has been described as “a deeply Caribbean novel rooted in memory and social reckoning.” Julia Alvarez writes, “Starring an unforgettably fierce ninety-nine-year-old Jamaican heroine, this ‘profound and beautiful novel’ transports readers to the heart of rural Jamaica with a tender and urgent story about who owns the land on which our identities are forged.” [Also see our previous post Diana McCaulays: A House for Miss Pauline.]
CARICON champions the promotion of Caribbean literature, culture, and heritage. And this prize honors the voices that are shaping the Caribbean literary landscape through bold, brilliant, and unforgettable storytelling.
Description: When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmer in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
For more information, see https://www.instagram.com/p/DLps-4wNPEL/
Also see https://cari-con.org/ and https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/imprint/little-brown-and-company/algonquin-books/
For purchasing information, see https://www.amazon.com/House-Miss-Pauline-Novel-ebook/dp/B0DFW8H4G6? sg