Guest Post: Around the World Book Tips featuring Barbados

We all love to read, enjoy numerous different genres and characters that enrich our life every day. What makes our literary world so special is that each country contributes with its own masterpieces to it. Let’s travel around and experience what makes each country’s literature so special, meet new authors and novels and get to know which, for us foreign, books fellow bloggers enjoy.

I hope you enjoy my guest post series "Around the World Book Tips"!

Today Lisa shares her favourite book(s) from her home country Barbados with us. Lisa studies Philosophy and Literature. Her favourite books can be characterised as literary fiction or science fiction. 

Don't forget to visit her blog Baffled Books!

Hi! I am here today to ramble on a bit about one of my favorite things: Caribbean lit. I think that it is the focus on discovery and identity that makes Caribbean literature so interesting to me. Trying to find yourself in a world that is constantly being redefined is a tricky business! It also definitely gets its magic from the shear diversity of history and cultures that have been all smushed together into a kind of soup of the universe. The different perspectives mean that you will always get something different.


Which is your favourite Caribbean book and why?

My favorite book is Suspended Sentences by Mark McWatt. McWatt is actually an English professor at my university so I am probably a bit biased but it is still great! It is written as a series of short stories by a group of friends who were sentences to do so after an incident at the local club bar involving some entertainingly literate graffiti (‘Sir Eustace is an anachronism’…). The short stories were supposed to be pulled together as a book but they never quite got round to it until one of the group disappears, feared dead, and McWatt (a character in his own book) decides to try to piece the stories together as a tribute. I love this book because of how it is written, the short stories within all supposedly by a different author with a different voice. It really grabs you into the story that follows their lives in a rather haphazard manner and pulls you through an ever changing Guyana.

If you got the chance to write a Caribbean themed novel, what would it be about?

I am a reader, not a writer by any means, but if I was going to write a book set in the Caribbean it would probably be about someone who gets very lost on the island roads. I get lost with ridiculous regularity, every time I stray from my time trusted routes or try to find some place new I end up at the other end of the island. It is small so this is entirely possible! My story would be about a girl who goes looking for a particular beach and somehow ends up circling a gully. When she gets out to look at the map she will be lured to a sign that magically appears but when she walks over to it *poof* she disappears and ends up in an alternate reality Barbados. I think this would be very fun to write and there is so much silliness I could get this poor girl into…

 

How would you title it?

For my title… well, I could go with something like “The Girl Who Got Lost” but instead I choose “The Day the Stop Sign Tricked Me” simply because I want to read a book with that title!

Which other country's book tip are you looking forward to?

Thanks for having me post today, it was so much fun thinking up my answers! I’m very much looking forward to learning a bit about South Africa. I haven’t read many (Ok, 1) South African novels and am intrigued! I would also love to hear about German and Indonesian authors, another vastly underrepresented area of my bookshelf. Much love from Barbados!

Lisa (BaffledBooks)

Thank you Lisa for writing this fun post. Stop signs always seem to trick me, so I would definitely read your story;)  

Want to be part of the post series and featured with your own international book tip? Shoot me an email at goldie-mail(AT)web(DOT)de!