Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous … a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean. Kempadoo has outdone herself: this is what happens when a book becomes a spell.
Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
This work is wonderful, brilliant, surreal and unlike anything I’ve read before in Caribbean Lit. Its plot has utopian and dystopian elements merging into each other, most times, without acknowledging differentiation. The work is a fable, a parable, and a mythic tale, spun together into a movement of sound and colour and form, but underpinned by abstraction, metaphor and a radical philosophy of being. A merging of land, sea and air into being that then creates a harmony where love exists on so many planes simultaneously that physical contact may or may not happen and/or it is happening all the time. Layer upon layer of ambiguity that transcends limitations because there is unspoken agreement about all things being possible.
Ramabai Espinet, author of The Swinging Bridge
Kempadoo’s engagement with Caribbean lore and mythology is spellbinding, magical, and wonderfully lyrical.
Don Winkler, Governor General Award-winning literary translator
A piece of speculative climate fiction, Naniki is a love letter to the Caribbean and its light-flecked waters. Despite its critical content, it is playful, refreshing, and luminous, inspiring an almost childlike curiosity and urge for exploration, while illustrating the importance of understanding our past to safeguard our future.
Montreal Review of Books
This work is wonderful, brilliant, surreal and unlike anything I’ve read before in Caribbean Lit. Its plot has utopian and dystopian elements merging into each other, most times, without acknowledging differentiation. The work is a fable, a parable, and a mythic tale, spun together into a movement of sound and colour and form, but underpinned by abstraction, metaphor and a radical philosophy of being. A merging of land, sea and air into being that then creates a harmony where love exists on so many planes simultaneously that physical contact may or may not happen and/or it is happening all the time. Layer upon layer of ambiguity that transcends limitations because there is unspoken agreement about all things being possible.
Ramabai Espinet, author of The Swinging Bridge