Monique Roffey, winner of the 2023 Costa Book of the Year Award and the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize, will be at The Writers Centre—the home of the Bocas Lit Fest and Paper Based Bookshop—to sign copies of her new novel, Passiontide, on Friday, June 28, 2024, from 3:30 to 5:00pm. Passiontide (Penguin Books, 2024) will be available for sale at Paper Based Bookshop. This event is free and open to the public. The Writers Centre is located at 14 Alcazar Street, St. Clair, Port of Spain, Trinidad. [See book summary below.]
The Bocas Lit Fest team shares: Published in the UK on 27 June, Passiontide is Roffey’s first novel since The Mermaid of Black Conch, which won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year Award and has been translated into 16 languages. Her earlier novel Archipelago won the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
“I’m so happy to be signing first edition copies of my new novel at The Writers Centre,” says Roffey. “Passiontide is my seventh novel, and it’s both a crime novel and a protest novel, touching on themes of solidarity amongst women over issues of gender-based violence. Passiontide imagines the community as hero, as opposed to a single individual, and imagines activists as the majority in active protest, not the minority. Come down and chat and get your book signed. I’d be excited to meet you, too.”
Summary: Early one morning, at the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel-pan player is found dead beneath a cannonball tree. It is a discovery that will transform the lives of everyone on this small island.
As the days pass, this shocking event draws together four women. There’s Sharleen, a journalist with an eye for the real story. Her childhood friend Tara, a pink-haired, straight-talking local activist. Gigi, the ‘notorious’ founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective. And Daisy, first lady of St Colibri, who is haunted by a disappearance in her own family decades ago.
In a community in which women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked time after time, the group soon find themselves compelled to speak out – and to act. But even they could never have foreseen the consequences of their courage…
For more information, see https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446129/passiontide-by-roffey-monique/9781787303188
Monique Roffey, winner of the 2023 Costa Book of the Year Award and the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize, will be at The Writers Centre—the home of the Bocas Lit Fest and Paper Based Bookshop—to sign copies of her new novel, Passiontide, on Friday, June 28, 2024, from 3:30 to 5:00pm. Passiontide (Penguin Books, 2024) will be
