My Brother

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother’s life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

Praise

"Controlled and fearless perfection."—Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"A sustained meditation on the grinding wheel of family, with mother always at the hub; on the countries of our past, both real and emotional, which we have fled and in which we have felt like strangers; on death as a devastating injury and dying as an irritating inconvenience . . . A memoir about death that portrays it as it is, not as we would have it be, as we so often tailor it both in memoir and fiction."—Anna Quindlen, The New York Times Book Review

"Visceral and wrenching, this is a memoir of mourning, at its core the death of Kincaid’s brother Devon Drew . . . The sheer nakedness of Kincaid's revelations is both intoxicating and redeeming. And in rubbing her hands over the sharp, unchecked edges of her life and her family, she has fashioned a memoir of unsparing honesty."—Renée Graham, The Boston Sunday Globe

About the Author(s)

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, A Small Place, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, My Garden (Book), Talk Stories (a collection of her New Yorker writings), and My Favorite Plant (a collection of writings on gardens, which she edited). In 2000 she was awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger for My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.

photo: Copyright Kenneth Noland

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