Will I love A Small Place?

As a child, I sometimes sensed the problems of the world and felt an anger at my helplessness to solve them.

The first time I read Kincaid’s writing, I was struck by the way in which she captured those feelings of frustration. She channels a well-worded rage at the ruling class, in this case focused on the treatment—socially, culturally, and environmentally—of Antigua.

Her withering critiques of tourists might make you mad if you’ve ever been one, but read until the end. While the book spares no one in its scathing view of Antigua’s colonial past and corrupt present, it is the evocative, precise prose and the insistence on a shared humanity that will remain with you long after the sting fades.

Kincaid is best known as a writer of novels and short stories, but this brief and piercing account of her experiences growing up in Antigua towards the end of the era of British rule illuminates the ways in which slavery and colonialism continued to affect Afro-Caribbean people well into the twentieth century. This memoir describes ugly experiences in beautiful prose, and offers a meditation on how individuals are shaped by history, but also how they can liberate themselves from it.