The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid’s most admired creations
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple—handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers’ world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is.
At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis’s and Mariah’s lives, she is also unraveling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character possessed with adamantine clear-sightedness and ferocious integrity—a captivating heroine for our time.
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“[Lucy] is stunningly frank and indomitable, firmly following her path to wisdom. Kincaid continues to hone the poetic style of her acclaimed novel Annie John. Her prose is sensual, surprising, vibrant, and candid. Her characters are deep wells of emotions that we can draw from again and again.”
— Booklist
“Brilliant…Lucy confirms Ms. Kincaid as a both a daughter of Bronte and Woolf and her own inimitable self.”
— Wall Street Journal“Beautifully precise prose…Leaves the reader with the unforgettable experience of having met a ferociously honest woman on her own uncompromising terms.”
— New York Times“Spare, sure-footed…An austere and beautiful short novel. Lucy is the perfect vehicle for Kincaid’s complex blend of toughness and vulnerability, cold insights about class and color cut through with a sun-warmed sense of mother and place.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“A slim book but Kincaid has crafted it with a spare elegance that has brilliance in its very simplicity.”
— Publishers Weekly“Strong in style and substance, dazzling with its sharp-edged prose, this is a novel no one should miss.”
— Library JournalBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Jamaica Kincaid is the author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction, including See Now Then, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is the 2022 recipient of the Hadada Award, the Paris Review’s award for lifetime achievement. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature. She is a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard and a visiting writer at UCLA in the spring of 2022. She was born in St. John’s and is a former reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, an Audie Award for directing, and many Earphones Awards. Her film and television acting credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors’ unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a BA degree in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.