See Now Then

In See Now Then Jamaica Kincaid has created a modern myth about a universal, contemporary subject: a marriage in crisis, a fracturing family. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their two children, Heracles and Persephone, live in the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont. Mr. Sweet, a frustrated composer, hails from New York's upper echelons, where women are always condescending to their maids and cabs are always hard to get on upper Fifth Avenue; Mrs. Sweet arrived in the country on a banana boat, chose yellow countertops, and likes to read books no one else cares about. Kincaid - through the heroic children Heracles and Persephone - evokes the bitterness of love gone sour and turned to contempt, the intensity of the bonds between parents and children, and the profound unknowability of all individuals.

Since the publication of her first short story collection - At the Bottom of the River, nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction - Kincaid has demonstrated a unique and piercing talent for seeing beyond, seeing through, the surface of things, which has made her one of our essential writers. In See Now Then, her powerfully original style has produced a work of searing originality and insight.

Genre: Literary Fiction