A House for Miss Pauline

Diana McCaulay

Starring an unforgettably fierce 99-year-old Jamaican heroine, A House for Miss Pauline is a transporting and tender story with a mystery at its heart that asks profound and urgent questions about who owns the land on which our identities are forged. For readers of Nicole Dennis-Benn, James McBride, and other stories about colonialism and personal history.

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 100th 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 one of the most 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 as his and his children’s. 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 drive her around the island, she sets off to find the people 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.

“Where has Diana McCaulay been all my reading life? In this engrossing and glorious novel--reminiscent of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas--prepare for full immersion in the world of Jamaica, not from a tourist's perspective but from the mind and heart and spirit of the unforgettable Miss Pauline, whose enslaved ancestors built the island that has historically dispossessed them. This is a profound and beautiful novel rich with encounters with the past and atonements in the present.”
Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies
“Diana McCaulay is one of the Caribbean's finest writers. As an environmental activist, a Jamaican woman, and a writer of both contemporary and historical fiction, her novels are building blocks of the current Caribbean canon and will be read for years to come.”
Monique Roffey
“History's crimes unfurl in this magical story--a story as Jamaican as the stones in the title--and Diana McCaulay's immaculate, breathtaking writing carries it with poise and conviction. This novel is poetry.”
Lisa Allen Agostini
“What begins as one woman's symphony of magic and loss soon unravels, stone by stone, secret by secret until we're left with nothing less than the brutal, turbulent, wild, and haunted history of Jamaica itself. Miss Pauline is the dazzling heroine of our times, a cypher for uncovering the secrets her world keeps hidden even as she hides her own. The center cannot hold, things fall apart, the past is uprooted, the present holds on by thread, and in the midst of it all is Miss Pauline, strong, conflicted, driven, and remarkable.
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Marlon James, Booker Prize–Winning Author of Moon Witch, Spider King