2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize (shortlist)
Starring an unforgettably fierce ninety-nine-year-old Jamaican heroine, this ‘profound and beautiful novel’ transports readers to the heart of rural Jamaica with a tender and urgent story about who owns the land on which our identities are forged (Julia Alvarez).
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
Genre: Historical
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"Where has Diana McCaulay been all my reading life? In this engrossing and glorious novel - reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas - prepare for full immersion in the world of Jamaica, not from a tourist's perspective but from the mind and heart and spirit of the unforgettable Miss Pauline, whose enslaved ancestors built the island that has historically dispossessed them. This is a profound and beautiful novel rich with encounters with the past and atonements in the present." - Julia Alvarez
"Diana McCaulay is one of the Caribbean's finest writers. As an environmental activist, a Jamaican woman, and a writer of both contemporary and historical fiction, her novels are building blocks of the current Caribbean canon and will be read for years to come." - Monique Roffey
"Diana McCaulay is one of the Caribbean's finest writers. As an environmental activist, a Jamaican woman, and a writer of both contemporary and historical fiction, her novels are building blocks of the current Caribbean canon and will be read for years to come." - Monique Roffey
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