The latest novel from a Manchester Met contemporary writing professor has received glowing praise ahead of its publication including Glamour’s Best Books of June and i-D’s Books for 2024.
Prof Monique Roffey’s Passiontide is set on a Caribbean island and follows four women who spark a revolution following a shocking event that transforms the lives of everyone in the community.
At the close of St Colibri’s carnival, a young female steel pan player is found dead beneath the cannonball tree and as the days pass, this discovery brings together four women.
Hailed by The Guardian as ‘A passionate protest novel’ where ‘Roffey’s world-building power is evident on every page’ Passiontide is Prof Roffey’s first novel since her Costa Book of the Year winner The Mermaid of Black Conch.
Prof Roffey said: “Passiontide is a protest and feminist novel set on a Caribbean island. It’s based on a true story about the killing of a young woman a few years ago which sparked a protest at the time, leading to the Mayor of Port of Spain in Trinidad resigning. In my book, I weaved a bigger story into this event and amplified other protests to highlight the global problem of the killing of women.”
Set in a community where women’s voices are often silenced and violence against them is overlooked, a group of four women are compelled to speak out and to act.
The story follows characters Sharlene, a journalist who has a sense for finding out the real story, and her childhood friend Tara who is part of the activism scene, Gigi, the founder of the Port Isabella Sex Workers Collective, and Daisy, the first lady of St Colibri, who experienced a disappearance in her family years ago, as they together navigate an uprising on their island.
The book has already earned praise and admiration, with Glamour declaring the novel ‘will keep you reading all hours… unforgettable’.
Prof Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of eight novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism and Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School.
Her novel The Mermaid of Black Conch won the 2020 Costa Book of the Year and the Costa Novel Award. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021, the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize, the Ondaatje Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2021.
Her acclaimed previous books include sun dog, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010, Archipelago, which won the OCM Bocas Award for Caribbean Literature in 2013, House of Ashes, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2014, and The Tryst and With the Kisses of His Mouth.
Passiontide by Prof Monique Roffey will be published by Harvill Secker on June 27.
