Red Island House

I very much doubt we’ll see any book explore colonialism and race with as much empathy and humanity ever again. We get several decades of stories from a black American woman as mistress of the manor in an African resort town. Her children - mixed race, international, and beyond privileged - build memories and therefore large parts of their identities there. Her own identity becomes more and more corrupted too, as the years go on. And yet she maintains her eye for narrative and myth - even a bit of magic - and shared it with us in these vignettes from her lifetime of vacations at the Red House. Andrea Lee very nearly does for Madagascar what Willa Cather did for the American Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop.