Taking in history, essays and poetry as well as fiction, novelist Claire Adam recommends favourite reading about her island nation
I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago and left, aged 18, to study at Brown University in the US. “Trinidad and To-bah-go!” people said when they learned where I was from. (I promptly corrected them: To-bay-go.) They knew of the country, although sometimes not its location, and I explained that we were a twin-island nation in the Caribbean, seven miles off the coast of Venezuela.
After graduating, when I went backpacking around Europe, I found that few people had heard of Trinidad at all: I took to pulling out a little fold-out map and pointing to the little dot by way of explanation. “The Caribbean!” people exclaimed. They knew about the beaches, the endless sunshine. But later their faces would cloud over – what on earth had possessed me to leave such a wonderful place?1 I did my best to explain, but I don’t think I succeeded. I’m not sure I even knew myself, back then, except that it had always been the goal. And it was that goal – to escape, to get somewhere better – that sparked the idea for my novel, Golden Child. During my five years of writing it, I was trying, among other things, to understand that relentless drive to get away from the country where I had grown up.
Related: Golden Child by Claire Adam review – which son would you choose?
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