A High Wind in Jamaica
1929 · 279 pages
A hurricane wrecks their Jamaican home, so the Bas-Thornton children are shipped to England and captured by pirates. Hughes strips childhood of its innocence, and the pirates prove no match for them.
★ 5.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2007 · 339 pages
Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey, desperate for love and buried in fantasy novels. Díaz runs his family through Trujillo's dictatorship in footnotes where history and comic books collide.
★ 5.1
The Feast of the Goat
2000 · 416 pages
Assassins wait in a car for Trujillo's Chevrolet on his last night. Vargas Llosa moves between them, the dictator's failing body, and the woman who returns thirty-five years later to accuse her father.
★ 5.3
The Four Voyages
1493 · 320 pages
Columbus wrote it all down, and the wonder and the greed are inseparable from the start: islands more beautiful than anything he has seen, and people he judges would make good servants.
★ 5.8
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
1552 · 143 pages
A Dominican friar who watched it happen set down, island by island, what Spain did to the people of the Caribbean. He forced an empire to argue whether the conquered were human.
★ 6.1
The Kingdom of This World
1949 · 136 pages
Carpentier's preface named the marvelous real: Latin American history already outruns anything the surrealists could invent. He proves it across the Haitian Revolution, watched from below by an enslaved man named Ti Noel.
★ 6.2
Cat's Cradle
1963 · 287 pages
Ice-nine, a crystal left by a father of the atomic bomb, freezes any water it touches. Vonnegut sets the scramble for it on an island whose religion is founded on comforting lies.
★ 6.4
The Black Jacobins
1938 · 448 pages
Enslaved people in the French colony that became Haiti rose in 1791 and defeated Napoleon's army. James wrote their revolution as world history, with Toussaint Louverture, born a slave, at its center.
★ 7.0
The Old Man and the Sea
1952 · 127 pages
Eighty-four days without a fish, and an old Cuban fisherman hooks a marlin longer than his boat and is towed out to sea. A man can be destroyed but not defeated, Santiago thinks.
★ 7.0
A House for Mr. Biswas
1961 · 564 pages
Mohun Biswas is born unlucky in rural Trinidad, marries into a large domineering family, and spends his life trying to own a house. Naipaul makes those small defeats as large as any tragedy.
★ 7.8