Peepal Tree

Peepal Tree is a wholly independent company, founded in 1985, and now publishing around 20 books a year. Our focus is on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world, though we are also concerned with Black British writing of different heritages. We publish fiction, poetry and a range of academic and non-fiction titles. Our goal is to publish books that make a difference.

We have published over 330 titles, and are committed to keeping most of them in print. The list features new writers and established voices. In 2009 we launched the Caribbean Modern Classics Series, which restores to print essential books from the past with new introductions.

We are based in Leeds in Yorkshire, part of an important independent publishing sector outside London. We are an Arts Council of England Portfolio organisation, and funding from the Arts Council enables us to support Inscribe, a writer development programme.

Our Founding and Managing Editor is Jeremy Poynting; Hannah Bannister is our operations manager; Kwame Dawes is our Associate Poetry Editor, and Jacob Ross plays the same role for fiction.

Publications

Sweet Li Jie

In Sweet Li Jie, two distant worlds converge: Wuhan Province in China and British Guiana. Jia Yun, a traveling textile merchant, leaves China to join the exodus of migrants escaping poverty - most of them to become indentured labourers in the canefields of Demerara. Through heartfelt letters intended for his sweetheart, Li Jie, Jia Yun paints a vivid picture of life for Indians, Africans, and other ethnic groups under British rule during the twilight years of indentureship. Meanwhile, the novel’s sections set in China reveal the struggles of rural Wuhan under a crumbling feudal regime.

Godzilla and the Song Bird

This immersive and powerful story has at its heart the continuing friendship between three boys with a love of cinema. Godzilla and the Song Bird is truly a War and Peace for Bangladesh, with Tolstoyan philosophical depth (and unTolstoyan humour!), and infused with a uniquely contemporary Bangla voice. As a vision of the world, it has a rich mix of its darkness and light, with scene after scene of brilliant storytelling driving the narrative, revealing truths about the difficult emergence of a postcolonial society and the double-edged nature of storytelling as a characteristic of Bengali culture.

The Mermaid of Black Conch

April 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.

The Frequency of Magic

Raphael earns his living as a butcher in a hillside village in rural Trinidad. He is also a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But somehow, miraculously, the novel, as Raphael has planned it in one hundred chapters of a thousand words, seems to write itself...

The Peepal Tree Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories

Since its beginnings in 1985, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories, reinforcing the view that the short story is the Caribbean literary form par excellence. This anthology draws from those collections, focusing on work written over the past twenty years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. Though quality is the ultimate criteria, this anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations.

Kitch

Combining factual biography with the imaginative structure and investment in the language of the novel, Anthony Joseph fully engages with the world he recreates, and by presenting a multifaceted view from Kitch’s friends, rivals and even enemies, he gets to the heart of the man behind the music and the myth, reaching behind the sobriquet to present a holistic portrait of the calypso icon Lord Kitchener.

Ricantations

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Ricantations will reinforce the perception of Collins Klobah as superb poetic story-teller with a compassionate and radical womanist vision, alert to the multi-layered reality of Puerto Rican life, where shiny modernity gives way to spirit presences.

The Ice Migration

The stories in this ambitious collection move around in time and place, linked by the experiences of the descendants of a Jamaican family of mixed Indian and African heritage.

Ascent to Omai

Wilson Harris’s ninth novel, first published in 1970, is a work of the most revolutionary and far-reaching kind of science or speculative fiction.

Tell No-One About This

This substantial collection brings together stories written over a span of forty years. Tell No One About This will confirm Ross as amongst the very best short story writers in the Caribbean and the UK.

Curfew Chronicles

The strength of these stories is particularly apparent in Rahim’s utterly convincing characterization. Each person has a resonant backstory and is caught at a moment of decision or revelation. The Minister and his wife, those targeted by the state, the KFC worker, those who speak out, and those who silence them: no one is unaffected by the state of emergency and the associated curfew. As the characters criss-cross a vividly and accurately mapped Trinidad, Rahim builds an unforgettable world of very real people caught up in an extraordinary situation.