Annie John Read online

  I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out.

  By Jamaica Kincaid

  At the Bottom of the River

  Annie John

  A Small Place

  Lucy

  The Autobiography of My Mother

  PRAISE FOR Annie John

  To take up this elegant little volume is to prepare yourself for a treat … Let the author of these beautiful sketches take you by the hand and lead you while she meditates about growing up on her Caribbean island.

  —Letitia Grierson, The Wall Street Journal

  There is a calypso lilt to [Kincaid’s style], but also a quality of gentler courtesy, a reluctance to shorten words or cut corners; the result is a naturally elegant rhythm … Adolescence is not a new theme, but Kincaid treats it with such loving precision and uses such a brilliant mix of emotions and sensations to describe it, placing it all in such a strange, vivid setting, and running through it a thread of familial love so strong, so steady and so colorful that we welcome this new version of it.

  —Roxana Robinson, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  Annie John herself is one of the most charming and willful characters in recent fiction … Kincaid is brilliant at capturing the spirit and dash that children bring to their mischief … It’s impossible not to fall in love with the richness of Kincaid’s prose, or with her extraordinary eye for detail.

  —Betsy Amster, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  Jamaica Kincaid uses the English language as if she had just invented it. Everything she writes about her childhood in Antigua has a new-minted ring to it, and there’s not a dull line or dusty cliché in the whole book.

  —Pamela Marsh, The Christian Science Monitor

  With sly humor and lilting prose, Jamaica Kincaid has woven a moving tapestry of childhood hurts and dreams.

  —Diane Cole, Ms. magazine

  I can’t remember reading a book that illustrates [the results of growing up] more poignantly than Annie John … [Annie John’s] story is so touching and familiar it could be happening in Anchorage, so inevitable it could be happening to any of us, anywhere, any time, any place. And that’s exactly the book’s strength, its wisdom, and its truth.

  —Susan Kenney, The New York Times Book Review

  Kincaid’s imagery is so neon-bright that the traditional story of a young girl’s passage into adolescence takes on a shimmering strangeness, the familial outlines continually forming surprising patterns … Thousands of first novelists have described those same emotions, but reading Annie John, you can almost believe Kincaid invented ambivalence.

  —Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Seldom has the desperate, angry, hurting state of being a teenager been so well depicted, and Kincaid offers unique insights into other areas of human experience as well … Annie herself is a great character: passionate, sly, cruel, intelligent, dominating, fearful and confused, she leaps out of the pages of this slim volume with ferocious energy.

  —Wendy Smith, Newsday

  A beautifully told story that cannot fail to touch any reader.

  —Amy Stromberg, The Washington Times Magazine

  Writing with poetic economy, Jamaica Kincaid escorts the reader of her lyrical novel through the life of a girl reluctantly growing into a woman … While Annie’s is a small, uneventful life, as are those of most people, Kincaid’s artistry makes it a fascinating one.

  —Phil Thomas, The Chattanooga News

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985 by Jamaica Kincaid

  All rights reserved

  Published in 1985 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 1997

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New Yorker, where the text of this book first appeared in slightly different form.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Kincaid, Jamaica

  Annie John /Jamaica Kincaid.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-110521-1

  ISBN-10: 0-374-10521-9

  I. Title.

  PS3561.I425A55 1985

  813'.54

  84-28630

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52510-1

  Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52510-2

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466837782

  First eBook edition: January 2013