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    Augustown
    Augustown
    Augustown
    Audiobook7 hours

    Augustown

    Written by Kei Miller

    Narrated by Dona Croll

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the wake of Marlon James's Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, Augustown-set in the backlands of Jamaica-is a magical and haunting novel of one woman's struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth. Ma Taffy may be blind but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do. For the story of Kaia leads back to another momentous day in Jamaican history, the birth of the Rastafari and the desire for a better life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9781501955228
    Augustown
    Author

    Kei Miller

    Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and has written several books across a range of genres. His 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection while his 2017 Novel, Augustown, won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. He is also an award-winning essayist. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter. He is the 2019 Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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    Reviews for Augustown

    4.5/5

    44 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Superb book that really reflects the complexities of post-colonial life on Jamaica and really good narration of the audiobook. This one will stay with me for a while.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a really good book that manages to be both interesting and a really good read all at once. The book starts with a chapter describing the locality, where Augustown is, what it looks like, what its people are. And the chapter finished with a short paragraph that is pregnant with possibility - and danger. For here is the truth: each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history. And with that we feel as if we are sitting a powder keg, just waiting for the apparently insignificant spark to set off an unstoppable chain of events. And yet there are several points at which the story could have turned; the fuse could have been stamped out; but they are evident only in retrospect.The story revolves around Ma Taffy, primarily, her niece, Gina, and Gina's son Kaia. The story is in 2 main time frames, the events of 11th April 1982 and the events of the past. We hear the story of Bedward , a charismatic preacher of Ma Taffy's youth who flew. Also in the crowd that day was a neighbour who plays a further role in the events of the later story as well.I liked the way that there is a lot of information and research here, but it's presented lightly. There are a large cast of characters, some of them appear fleetingly, others appear and then reappear in the later time frame . It shows that the events of today are built upon the events of the past and today's trigger only takes place, in some senses, because of the past that is sitting there with threatening potentiality. There was a lot of dialect in the speech, but the story used this more sparingly, such that it didn't feel that it took a long time to get int the story - I've struggled with dialect in the past, but these seemed manageable.
    • 3/5
      Atmospheric.I particularly wanted to enjoy this book as the author was at our literary festival and he was just lovely. He was the only man on a panel for International Ladies Day and had such empathy. I really felt this empathy in the way he wrote his main character of Augustown, the elderly, blind, Ma Taffy.I was listening to the audio version of this book, read by Dona Croll, which was great for getting the correct Jamaican accent, but a bit irritatingly slow.However, for me, the part that lowered my star rating was the story about the flying preacherman, which didn't grab my attention at all. What I didn't realise when listening was that this story represented the beginnings of the Jamaican religion of Bedwardism, which, to quote Wikipedia, 'was one of the most popular Afro-Jamaican politico-religious movements from the 1890s to the 1920s".The rest of the novel was excellent and the characters were interesting. Ma Taffy's great-nephew, Kaia, has his dreadlocks cut off by a teacher and there is a nice circle of connections between the characters of Ma Taffy's family as the story progresses. A heavy atmosphere of impending trouble and doom runs throughout the novel and is excellently portrayed by the author. In the opening scene we meet a young gangster who thinks Ma Taffy doesn't know he hides his guns under her house, and later the Rastafarians mass to protest the cutting of Kaia's dreadlocks. Class segregation and social hierarchy felt like a living entity that could spark a riot at any time.