The Mermaid of Black Conch
by Monique Roffey
A mermaid caught by tourists. A fisherman sets her free.
you want to understand the Caribbean through a myth that tells the truth about what outsiders have always done to it
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Aycayia has been a mermaid for centuries, cursed by jealous wives, swimming the waters off the fictional Caribbean island of Black Conch. When American sport fishermen catch her as a trophy, a local fisherman named David cuts her free and takes her home as she slowly transforms back into a woman. Roffey uses the fable to dispatch from inside the Caribbean's deepest experience — the island as something beautiful that outsiders keep arriving to possess. The curse, the catching, the slow reclamation of a body and a self. The most mythologically rich Trinidad novel on this shelf and the one that earns its strangeness completely.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Trinidad • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Trinidadian author
- Themes
- After Empire
