Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Length: 288 pages
Audiobook Length: 8 hours and 41 minutes
First Published: 2021
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Publisher’s Description
In the tradition of Zadie Smith and Marlon James, a brilliant Caribbean writer delivers a powerful story about four people each desperate to escape their legacy of violence in a so-called “paradise.”
In Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, Lala’s grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It’s a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter’s Tunnels. When she’s grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven into the Tunnels by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives.
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town, told by an astonishing new author of literary fiction.
Quotes from How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
You understand that if you must learn to love a man, he is probably not the man you should be loving.
She will tell her, she vows, that loving a child does not come naturally, not for everyone, not even if it is a child you have birth to.
What are secrets but things we want to forget? Why then would we keep the acquaintance of others who remember them?
About Cherie Jones
Cherie Jones is the author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. Jones currently lives in Barbados.