We’re starting 2026 with a literary feast from the Caribbean and its diaspora, as Caribbean writers deliver some of the most anticipated books of the year. From sweeping historical fiction that uncovers hidden histories to love stories that examine the cost of freedom, and contemporary novels exploring modern womanhood, these 2026 Caribbean book releases are not to be missed.
Spanning Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, this new wave of Caribbean literature reflects stories that are deeply grounded in Caribbean experience while resonating with readers everywhere. The year brings powerful debuts from emerging voices, long-awaited sequels to bestselling novels, and ambitious new works from award-winning Caribbean and Caribbean-diaspora authors. Here are the Caribbean books to add to your reading list in 2026—starting with part one of our most anticipated releases.
Fire, Sword & Sea
by Vanessa Riley
Trinidad and Tobago | January 13, 2026 | Buy It
Inspired by the legend of seventeenth-century pirate Jacquotte Delahaye, Vanessa Riley delivers a sweeping historical saga set against the brutal beauty of the Caribbean in 1675. Born the mixed-race daughter of a Tortuga tavern owner, Jacquotte refuses the narrow future laid out for her and disguises herself as a man to claim freedom on the open sea. Among a floating world of assumed identities, she finds kinship with fellow outsiders, deep love, and hard-won power. As piracy collides with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, Jacquotte must decide what kind of legacy she will leave behind. With meticulous research and cinematic scope, Riley reclaims a forgotten history of Black women who carved lives of resistance in a violent world.
Fireflies in Winter
by Eleanor Shearer
Jamaica + Cuba | February 10, 2026 | Buy It
Set in the frozen wilderness of Nova Scotia in 1796, Eleanor Shearer’s luminous follow-up to River Sing Me Home tells a love story shaped by exile, survival, and defiance. Cora, newly arrived from Jamaica, is unprepared for the cold—or for the fierce independence of Agnes, a woman living in hiding among the cedars. Drawn together by circumstance and choice, the two women create a fragile refuge in a landscape that threatens to swallow them whole. But as the past closes in, their bond is tested by the harsh realities of freedom in a world determined to deny it. Shearer writes with quiet intensity, grounding romance in a vividly realized history rarely explored in fiction.
Raffia Embroidery
by Tihara Smith
St. Lucia | February 17, 2026 | Buy It
In this striking debut craft book, fashion designer and textile artist Tihara Smith invites readers into the vibrant world of raffia embroidery, inspired by her Caribbean heritage. Featuring ten accessible yet elegant projects—from wall hangings and hoop art to bags and cushions—the book blends traditional materials with contemporary design. Smith pairs step-by-step guidance with full-size templates, making the craft approachable for beginners while satisfying seasoned makers. Interwoven throughout is a deeply personal exploration of raffia’s cultural history and its place within her family’s Windrush story. The result is both a tactile how-to guide and a loving preservation of Caribbean craft traditions.
Where the False Gods Dwell
by Denny S. Bryce
Jamaica | February 24, 2026 | Buy
Drawing inspiration from Katherine Dunham’s groundbreaking 1935 research expedition, Denny S. Bryce weaves a richly layered historical novel about three women brought together by chance and ambition. Each arrives in Jamaica carrying secrets and longing—for escape, for validation, for justice—only to find themselves bound by circumstance in the island’s Cockpit Country. As a devastating hurricane approaches, the women are forced into an uneasy alliance that will test their convictions and reshape their futures. Moving between Chicago ballrooms and Jamaican sugarcane fields, the novel captures a moment of cultural reckoning and personal transformation. Bryce’s signature blend of meticulous research and emotional depth illuminates a pivotal chapter in Caribbean and Black American history.
Good, Good Loving
by Yvette Edwards
Montserrat | March 5, 2026
Yvette Edwards returns with a sharp, tender, and often hilarious portrait of a British-Caribbean family reckoning with love, resentment, and memory. As matriarch Ellen lies in a hospital bed, her children gather not in quiet reverence but in a storm of grievances—small slights, old wounds, and one devastating secret. Moving backward through time, the novel reveals the sacrifices Ellen made and the choices that shaped generations. Set against the backdrop of the Windrush era and its aftermath, the story captures the complexity of migration, marriage, and motherhood. Brimming with wit and emotional insight, this is a family novel that refuses sentimentality while honoring survival.
The Starter Ex
by Mia Sosa
March 10, 2026 | Buy It Here
Mia Sosa delivers a whip-smart romantic comedy about fake dating, messy feelings, and unexpected vulnerability. Vanessa Cordero once ran a lucrative side hustle as a “starter ex,” hired to make men so unbearable their partners looked irresistible by comparison. When she agrees to one last job—posing as the wildly inappropriate girlfriend of a commitment-phobe desperate to appease his mother—rules are set and promptly broken. What begins as performance soon blurs into something dangerously real. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Spanish Harlem, this sexy, hilarious rom-com celebrates Nuyorican culture while asking what happens when love refuses to stick to the script.
My Jamaican Table
by Andre Fowles
Jamaica | March 10, 2026 | Buy It
Kingston-born chef Andre Fowles offers a bold, contemporary celebration of Jamaican cuisine in this vibrant debut cookbook. Featuring over 100 recipes, the collection honors the island’s layered culinary history while embracing innovation and personal expression. Classic dishes sit alongside modern interpretations, each reflecting Jamaica’s Indigenous, African, Asian, and European influences. Rich photography and storytelling turn the book into both a practical kitchen companion and an immersive cultural journey. More than a collection of recipes, My Jamaican Table is a love letter to food as memory, identity, and resilience.
Queen of the Night Sky
by Amalie Howard
Trinidad and Tobago | March 17, 2026 | Buy It
The sweeping romantasy duology reaches its dramatic conclusion as Sura faces the cost of power, loyalty, and love. With her world reshaped by magic and betrayal, she is forced beyond familiar borders into a realm ruled by the dangerous and enigmatic Night King. As old bonds fracture and new alliances form, Sura must confront the darkness growing both within her and in those she once trusted most. Drawing inspiration from Indian and Persian mythology, Amalie Howard crafts a lush, sensual fantasy steeped in political intrigue and emotional intensity. This finale delivers high stakes, aching romance, and breathtaking worldbuilding.
The Caribbean Cookbook
by Rawlston Williams
St. Vincent and the Grenadines | April 2026 | Buy It
In The Caribbean Cookbook, chef Rawlston Williams offers a sweeping exploration of Caribbean cuisine and culinary history, celebrating a food culture shaped by ingenuity, survival, and creativity. Featuring more than 380 authentic home-cooking recipes from 28 countries and island nations, the book captures the extraordinary diversity of the region’s flavors and traditions. Organized into thoughtfully curated chapters—from broths and rices to Sea & River, On Land, Flour, Sugar, Juice, and Rum—it reflects how everyday cooking tells the story of a people. Iconic ingredients like citrus, nutmeg, coconut, tamarind, pimento, pineapple, and rum take center stage, with spices driving the depth and complexity of each dish. Both comprehensive and deeply rooted in cultural context, this is a definitive celebration of Caribbean food as history, identity, and imagination.
About To Fall Apart
by Ashley Hickson-Lovence
St. Lucia + Grenada | April 2026 | Buy It
Ashley Hickson-Lovence brings his lyrical intensity to a novel shaped by migration, masculinity, and emotional survival. Set across the Caribbean and the UK, the story traces lives strained by expectations, silence, and the pressure to endure without breaking. As relationships fray and past choices resurface, the novel captures the quiet moments where everything threatens to collapse. With poetic language and raw honesty, Hickson-Lovence explores vulnerability as both risk and salvation. This is an intimate, unflinching portrait of people standing at the edge of transformation.
Visitations
by Julia Alvarez
Dominican Republic | April 7, 2026 | Buy It
Julia Alvarez returns to poetry with a luminous collection drawn from decades of living, loving, and witnessing. Moving fluidly through themes of family, aging, language, memory, and the body, these poems carry the warmth and wisdom of a master storyteller. Each piece feels like a conversation across time—between past and present selves, between silence and voice. With clarity and emotional generosity, Alvarez reflects on what it means to belong to oneself and to others. Visitations is both intimate and expansive, a testament to poetry as a lifelong home.
Honey
by Imani Thompson
Jamaica | April 21, 2026 | Buy It
Darkly comic and ferociously intelligent, Honey introduces a protagonist who channels rage into a warped sense of justice. Yrsa, a graduate student immersed in theories of power and dispossession, reaches a breaking point after witnessing yet another act of academic theft and erasure. What follows is a sharp, unsettling examination of violence as both rebellion and self-deception. With biting humor and fearless insight, Thompson interrogates race, gender, class, and moral certainty. This debut announces a bold new voice unafraid to provoke discomfort—or laughter.
Last Night in Brooklyn
by Xóchitl González
Puerto Rico | April 21, 2026 | Buy It
Reimagining The Great Gatsby through a Black and brown Brooklyn lens, Xóchitl González captures a fleeting cultural moment on the brink of collapse. Drawn into the orbit of artists, dreamers, and strivers, Alicia finds herself seduced by ambition and proximity to wealth she can never fully claim. As friendships, romances, and illusions unravel against the backdrop of political change and economic crisis, the cost of aspiration comes sharply into focus. With electric prose and keen social insight, González examines the promises—and betrayals—of the American Dream. This is Brooklyn at its most intoxicating and precarious.
Layaway Child
by Chanel Sutherland
St. Vincent and the Grenadines | May 12, 2026 | Buy It
Layaway Child is a luminous debut short story collection that traces the emotional terrain of Caribbean migration through the lives of girls and women shaped by separation, longing, and resilience. In interconnected, lyrical stories, award-winning writer Chanel Sutherland explores families fractured by migration, focusing on mothers who leave home to work abroad and the children they are forced to leave behind. Moving between lush island childhoods defined by community and absence, and the cold, alienating spaces of Canadian cities, the collection captures what it means to grow up between worlds. Sutherland writes with deep compassion and precision about girlhood under scrutiny, the ache of maternal distance, and the quiet negotiations of identity across borders.
Now Then
by Morgan Radford
Jamaica + Cuba | May 12 2026 | Buy It
Blending cultural history with personal reflection, Now Then examines the threads that connect past and present across the Caribbean diaspora. Moving between Jamaica, Cuba, and the United States, Radford interrogates memory, inheritance, and identity in a world shaped by displacement. The book reflects on how history is lived, remembered, and sometimes misremembered. With lyrical insight and journalistic precision, Radford offers a meditation on time and belonging. This is a thoughtful exploration of how we carry where we come from.
Smallie
by Eden Mckenzie Goddard
Barbados + Jamaica | May 28, 2026
Spanning generations and continents, Smallie traces the enduring impact of migration on one British-Caribbean family. From a young woman’s journey from Barbados to postwar London to the devastating consequences of the Windrush scandal decades later, the novel reveals how history ripples through private lives. At its heart is a search—for love, for belonging, for proof of existence in an unforgiving system. Tender yet unsparing, the story balances heartbreak with resilience. This debut announces a deeply compassionate voice in diasporic fiction.
Queenie Is Working On It
by Candice Carty-Williams
Jamaica | July 2, 2026 (UK); September 2026 (US)
Ten years after readers first met Queenie Jenkins, she returns older, bruised, and still searching for footing. Navigating heartbreak, career frustrations, housing precarity, and the pressure of expectations she’s not sure she believes in, Queenie remains achingly relatable. With her signature wit and emotional precision, Candice Carty-Williams captures the messiness of growth and the exhaustion of becoming. The novel balances humor with vulnerability, charting Queenie’s attempts to rebuild a life that feels true to herself. It’s a sequel that deepens, rather than softens, its portrait of modern womanhood.
Take What You Can
by Naima Coster
Dominican Republic | July 7, 2026 | Buy It
Naima Coster delivers a nuanced exploration of female friendship tested by time, class, and motherhood. Once inseparable, Val and Milly reunite with dreams of raising their daughters side by side—only to confront the unspoken tensions that have always shaped their bond. As marriages strain and old insecurities resurface, the question becomes not whether they love each other, but whether love is enough. With emotional clarity and sharp observation, Coster examines intimacy, ambition, and the quiet negotiations women make to stay connected. This is a resonant portrait of friendship in flux.
Hispanic Star: Lin Manuel Miranda
by
Puerto Rico | August 18, 2026 | Buy It
Meet award-winning songwriter, actor, producer, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda in this vibrant, illustrated biography for young readers from Hispanic Star, published in both English and Spanish. Once a kid growing up in Manhattan and spending summers with family in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, Miranda’s love of music and theater shaped a creative path that would lead him to redefine American storytelling. From In the Heights and Hamilton to beloved Disney films Moana and Encanto, his work celebrates culture, history, and imagination. Part of Hispanic Star’s acclaimed series spotlighting Hispanic and Latinx changemakers, this book honors a creative force who has shaped the future of American culture. With its empowering message—If you can see it, you can be it—the story invites young readers to dream boldly and see themselves reflected in possibility.
Dèy
by Edwidge Danticat
Haiti | August 25, 2026 | Buy It
Moving between Haiti, Brooklyn, and Miami, Dèy follows Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent whose sense of safety, family, and self is profoundly shaken after she is caught in a random act of gun violence while shopping for her daughter. Though physically unharmed, Magnolia carries the trauma in silence, using the moment to reexamine her relationships—with her daughter, her partner, and her parents, each marked by love, distance, and unspoken grief. As she traces the ghosts of her family’s past and confronts her own fears of unraveling, Magnolia is pulled between questions of home, belonging, and survival. Taking its title from the Creole word for mourning, the novel explores how grief is shared, inherited, and endured within families. With luminous tenderness and emotional clarity, Danticat delivers one of her most powerful meditations yet on love, loss, and the fragile beauty of being alive.
Bodega Stories
by Amaris Castillo
Dominican Republic | September 8, 2026
Set in the vibrant ecosystem of neighborhood bodegas, Amaris Castillo’s debut captures the pulse of community life in all its humor and heartbreak. Through interconnected stories, the book explores migration, survival, and the quiet heroism of everyday labor. Each vignette reveals how these small spaces become sites of memory, connection, and cultural preservation. Castillo writes with warmth and sharp observation, honoring lives often overlooked. Bodega Stories is a celebration of resilience found in ordinary places.
fragile beauty of being alive.
Sweet Pea
by Kit de Waal
St. Kitts and Nevis | November 3, 2026 | Buy It
When Paulette arrives on English shores as a young girl, she leaves behind a grandmother in St. Kitts who called her “Sweet Pea,” taught her how to cook, and urged her to choose love and forgiveness over all else. Now twenty-nine and dreaming of a family with the man she loves, Paulette’s life is shattered when Denton is killed in a sudden car accident. As she grieves, Denton’s friend Garfield drifts into her life, and from that brief union comes her son, Bird—whom Paulette vows to give everything she can, even as she releases Garfield from her future. Years later, fate delivers an unthinkable reckoning: Paulette encounters the man who was driving the car that killed Denton, along with the grandson he struggles to raise—a boy the same age as Bird. Despite her anger and sorrow, Paulette opens her home and heart, offering care, warmth, and the name “Sweet Pea” once more. Beautiful and profound, Sweet Pea is a tender novel about grief, forgiveness, and the quiet, transformative power of love in shaping a found family.