A House for Miss Pauline

Starring an unforgettably fierce ninety-nine-year-old Jamaican heroine, this "profound and beautiful novel" transports readers to the heart of rural Jamaica with a tender and urgent story about who owns the land on which our identities are forged (Julia Alvarez).

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her one-hundredth birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming a successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father, Clive.

Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan--a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.

With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.

Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land--and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.

Author: Diana McCaulay
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 02/25/2025
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781643757223


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 09/01/2024 pg. 13
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2025
Booklist 01/01/2025 pg. 26
Publishers Weekly 03/03/2025
Shelf Awareness 02/22/2025

About the Author

Diana McCaulay is a much-recognized Jamaican environmental activist and the award-winning author of five novels. Winner of the Gold Musgrave Medal, Jamaica's highest award for lifetime achievement across the arts and sciences; twice Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region (in 2022 and in 2012), she has also been shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award, among other nominations, and is the winner of the Watson, Little 50 Prize for unrepresented writers aged 50+. Diana was born and lives in Kingston, Jamaica, is a founding editor of Pree, an online magazine for Caribbean writing, and is currently also working on an anthology of environmental writing.