- Paperback: 336 pages
- Published: 4/1/25
- IBSN: 9781636141916
- e-IBSN: 9781636142036
- Genre: Fiction
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My Own Dear People
A young Jamaican man struggles to overcome toxic masculinity—his culture’s and his own—in this Caribbean coming-of-age novel.
Now available for preorder. All preorders will ship on or before April 1, 2025.
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Forthcoming: 4/1/25
What people are saying…
“Manhood, masculinity, what it means to grow up in a world where who you are and who you are expected to be exist in powerful, soul-deep struggle . . . Dwight Thompson’s My Own Dear People tackles all these issues and more, in an important, beautifully written novel about a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the actions (and inactions) of his own past. This is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time.”
—Jerry Stahl, author of Nein, Nein, Nein!
“Like Naipaul in A House for Mr. Biswas, Dwight Thompson takes on what seems to be the autobiographical, or memoir, but gives it contextual relevance as it places it in one of Jamaica’s ‘hottest’ cities . . . Death Register is a weighty book in its ambition and themes, also because it is a mirror of the Jamaican society, with its misogyny and growing culture of scam. It is weighty because it speaks to us and shows us how crippling childhood trauma is and how cruel we can be to each other—the adult to the child, lovers to lovers, etc. There is much in this book for critical discussion and introspection.”
—Jamaica Gleaner, on Death Register
“Conveyed primarily through richly imagined dialogue and extracts from Chauncey’s writing, one young man’s attempt to come to terms with his own deficiencies is the beating heart of the book. Dwight Thompson is to be commended for such an unflinchingly honest portrait of a character striving not only to be a better writer but— crucially—a better person.”
—New International, on Death Register
“A single experience can offset a planned trajectory, and a single experience can doom the most favored among us. Such is the haunting lesson of Death Register. Amid childhood chivalry, bravado, and adventurism there persists a macabre ‘spirit’ poised to unleash unspeakable madness.”
—Glenville Ashby, Kaieteur News, on Death Register
Description
IN HIGH SCHOOL IN MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA, teenager Nyjah Messado witnessed the rape of Maude Dallmeyer, a teacher trainee. Some of the boys who committed the assault are his friends and he’s soon torn between the masculine code at the all boys’ school and his own conscience. This guilt haunts him during his years away at college. It continues to weigh heavily upon him when he returns home, and Nyjah finds it increasingly difficult for him to spend time with his best friend, Chadwell, who participated in the rape. A unique chance to reunite with Maude gives Nyjah the opportunity to admit his complicity as a do-nothing witness, and ask for forgiveness. But will he take it? And will she accept it—or will his own journey for inner peace only renew her trauma?
My Own Dear People is a multilayered story exploring both the effects of toxic masculinity and the bonds of friendship. We see Nyjah trying to come to terms with his own place in multiple worlds: in his family; at school, with its colonial Eurocentric ethos; and within the religion and politics of Montego Bay and the city’s criminal gangs. Through his time away at college, he is beginning to develop his own sense of accountability and an understanding of the life he is living.
Stylistically engaging and ambitious in scope, the novel takes us through a sweeping movement between the younger and more mature selves of Nyjah: from the homophobia prevalent in Jamaican boys’ schools and the institutionalized form it takes, to the paranoia and denial surrounding adolescent sexuality, to the corruption of a society that runs so nakedly on power relations and social class. Similar to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, My Own Dear People looks unflinchingly at proclivities toward cruelty, particularly toward women and LGBTQ+ people. Dwight Thompson elevates the tradition of the coming-of-age novel by boldly examine how sexual predation crosses both gay and straight worlds.
- Subjects: Black Interest, Caribbean Interest, Forthcoming, Literary Fiction
- Tags: Dwight Thompson, My Own Dear People
Book Details
Author
DWIGHT THOMPSON is the award-winning author of the novel Death Register and has published short stories in PREE and the Caribbean Writer. He won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize, was short-listed for the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition, and was long-listed for the 2021 and 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. My Own Dear People is his second novel. He was born and raised in Jamaica, and currently works at an international school in Hiroshima, Japan.