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A Novel
When a female musician is found murdered on a small tropical island, after a string of similar deaths, outraged local women take matters into their own hands.
The quiet calm of Ash Wednesday morning. Carnival is over. Everyone on the small island of St. Colibri is sleeping peacefully. Everyone except Sora Tanaka, a young pan player lying under the cannonball tree. Sora, a professional musician, had been visiting St. Colibri to take part in the island's famous steel pan competition. But Sora isn't asleep; she's dead: brutally murdered, and still in her costume. And as the women of this island know all too well, Sora is far from the first woman to be killed, and she probably won't be the last, either. In fact, the problem of women being killed on the island is so bad, there's even a dedicated unit within the police department: OMWEN, the Office for Murdered Women, headed by Inspector Cuthbert Loveday.
In this powerful new rewriting of the detective novel, Sora's death is the last straw and the beginning of something much larger, a "revolution" some are calling it. The event draws together four women who have never before seen each other as allies: a friend of the victim, the organizer of a sex workers' collective, a local activist, and the prime minister's wife. Tenderly, sometimes hilariously, Passiontide chronicles how these women join forces and find new ways to help one another.
"Roffey enlivens the proceedings with details of the women's righteous organizing and colloquial dialogue, but the narrative structure feels disjointed, and multiple story lines are left unresolved as the novel morphs into a social manifesto. Still, Roffey's vital message is hard to shake." —Publishers Weekly
"Monique Roffey's Passiontide skillfully intertwines elements of documentary, mythology, grassroots feminism and farce to craft a riveting narrative centered on women seizing control of their destinies. Guided by its intricately drawn characters and razor-sharp characterization, the novel captivates readers from its opening pages to its compelling conclusion." —Roger Robinson, author of A Portable Paradise, winner of the TS Eliot Prize for poetry
"Passiontide is a resounding testament to the rebellious spirit and bravery of Caribbean women. This is an urgent and deeply necessary novel about women reclaiming their own power and future in the face of gender-based violence. Monique Roffey has written a firebrand womanist text, a battle cry, a rousing vision of change for a better, possible world. By the end of this book, I was ready to join the revolution." —Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
"Monique Roffey is a trailblazer of Caribbean literature, and I will read anything she writes. Passiontide is a reckoning, a protest, and a prayer. I'm writing this from Trinidad, in the aftermath of another murdered woman, asking myself the same question Roffey's characters ask: which of us will be next? And yet, even as Passiontide captures the pain-laced lives of our women, the book still holds hope in its heart. Maybe, through our shared courage, we can change." —Breanne Mc Ivor, author of The God of Good Looks
This information about Passiontide was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jonathan Proctor
Monique Roffey is a writer, lecturer and activist and has been writing for over twenty years. In this time, she's published seven books (a memoir and six novels), some short fiction, many essays and some literary journalism. Some of her books have been awarded prizes, or been nominated for prizes, such as, the Costa Fiction Award, 2020, and the Costa Book of the Year, 2020, for The Mermaid of Black Conch; it was also short-listed for the Rathbones Folio Award, 2021, the Goldsmiths Prize, 2020 and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, 2021. In 2013, Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 2010. She teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
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