fbpx
Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

||| |||

Catalog » Browse by Title: M » My Own Dear People

My Own Dear People

By:

A young Jamaican man struggles to overcome toxic masculinity—his culture’s and his own—in this Caribbean coming-of-age novel.

Order on Bookshop
Order on Barnes & Noble
Order on Amazon

$18.95 $14.21

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 MONTEGO BAY, JAMAICA, teenager Nyjah Messado witnesses a brutal assault by some of the boys in his circle of friends. Torn between the masculine code at his private all boys’ school and his own conscience, Nyjah fails to intervene, and comes of age haunted by the guilt of his inaction.

Stylistically engaging, ambitious in scope, and brimming with poetic patois, the novel takes us through a sweeping movement between the younger and more mature selves of Nyjah. We see him 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. 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 examining how sexual predation crosses both gay and straight worlds.


Book Details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Published: 4/1/25
  • IBSN: 9781636141916
  • e-IBSN: 9781636142036

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.

Author Events

More info »