My Brother - by Jamaica Kincaid (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

Review Quotes

"Controlled and fearless perfection." --Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"A sustained meditation on the grinding wheel of family, with mother always at the hub; on the countries of our past, both real and emotional, which we have fled and in which we have felt like strangers; on death as a devastating injury and dying as an irritating inconvenience . . . a memoir about death that portrays it as it is, not as we would have it be, as we so often tailor it both in memoir and fiction." --Anna Quindlen, The New York Times Book Review

"Visceral and wrenching, this is a memoir of mourning . . . Kincaid's revelations are both intoxicating and redeeming." --René Graham, The Boston Sunday Globe

About the Author