Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2024) will be available later this month. Jasmine Sealy (author of The Island of Forgetting) calls the book a marvel. She writes, “Through prose that leaps off the page and burrows under your skin, Christina Cooke renders a Jamaica that is lush, sensuous, and brimming with hope and joy.”
Description: At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach.
Tired of not having a place to land, twenty-year-old Akúa flies from Canada to her native Jamaica to reconnect with her estranged sister. Their younger brother Bryson has recently passed from sickle cell anemia—the same disease that took their mother ten years prior—and Akúa carries his remains in a small wooden box with the hopes of reassembling her family.
Over the span of two fateful weeks, Akúa and Tamika visit significant places from their childhood—the home they grew up in, their mother’s grave, a favorite beach—where Akúa slowly spreads Bryson’s ashes. But time spent with her sister only clarifies how different they are, and how years of living abroad haves distanced Akúa from her home culture. “Am I Jamaican?” she asks herself again and again. But beneath these haunting doubts lies her anger and resentment at being abandoned by her own blood. “Why didn’t you stay with me?” she wants to ask Tamika.
Wandering through Kingston with her brother’s ashes in tow, Akúa meets Jayda, a brash young woman who shows her a different side of the city. As the two grow closer, Akúa confronts the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what being a gay woman in Jamaica actually means.
By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy is a profoundly moving debut novel that asks: what do we truly owe our family, and what are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?
Christina Cooke (born in Jamaica) is a fiction and poetry writer who bounces between the U.S. and Canada. Her writing has previously appeared in PRISM international, The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, Matrix Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, a 2022 Journey Prize winner, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award winner, she holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Cooke is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City.
For more information, see https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/731246/broughtupsy-by-christina-cooke/ and https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1646221885?tag=randohouseinc7986-20
Also see more on the writer at https://www.christinajcooke.com/about and https://lithub.com/christina-cooke-on-writing-the-book-she-was-looking-for/
Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy: A Novel (Penguin Random House, 2024) will be available later this month. Jasmine Sealy (author of The Island of Forgetting) calls the book a marvel. She writes, “Through prose that leaps off the page and burrows under your skin, Christina Cooke renders a Jamaica that is lush, sensuous, and brimming with hope and joy.”
