** WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 **
'Monique Roffey is a unique talent and most daring and versatile of writers' - Bernardine Evaristo
March 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. Aycayia, a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by this man David and his song.
Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer. The Mermaid of Black Conch, is her most recent novel, published in April 2020 by Peepal Tree Press. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Writing School, at MMU, and a tutor online for The National Writers Centre. Her last novel, The Tryst, (Dodo Ink), 2017, was widely reviewed, and in 2014, House of Ashes, was shortlisted for both the Costa Fiction Award, 2015, and the OCM Bocas Award for Fiction, 2015. Archipelago, published in 2012, a New World odyssey which examines loss, grief and climate change, won the OCM BOCAS prize for Caribbean Literature in 2013. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, first published in 2009, received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2010 and the Encore prize 2011. It was heralded as a major contribution to the New Generation of Caribbean fiction coming out of the region. Her erotic memoir, With the Kisses of his Mouth was published to much praise and controversy in the summer of 2011. Her website is: www.moniqueroffey.com