Every June, we temporarily leave the continent and journey to the Caribbean islands to read stories from our cousins, people distanced from us by colonialism, slavery, migration, and history… but still deeply connected to us through memory, resistance, language, rhythm, spirituality, and survival.

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And this month, we’re making a stop in Jamaica!

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In a small community called Augustown.

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Our June Book of the Month is Augustown by Kei Miller, and wow… what a story.

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This book is lyrical, haunting, political, spiritual, tender, and deeply human all at once.

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At the center of it is Kaia, a young Rastafarian boy whose dreadlocks are cut off at school in an act of humiliation that ripples through an entire community. But surrounding that story are legends, old women who carry memory like scripture, flying preachers, questions of Black identity, colonial violence, faith, and the quiet ways people resist being erased.

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11 April 1982: a smell is coming down John Golding Road right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can hold it off for just a little bit longer, she will. So she asks a question that surprises herself even as she asks it, "Kaia, I ever tell you bout the flying preacherman?"

Set in the backlands of Jamaica, Augustown is a magical and haunting novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.