What A Mother's Love Don't Teach You
What A Mother's Love Don't Teach You
At eighteen years old, Dinah gave away her baby son to the rich couple she worked for before they left Jamaica. They never returned. She never forgot him.
Eighteen years later, a young man comes from the US to Kingston. From the moment she sees him, Dinah never doubts – this is her son.
What happens next will make everyone question what they know and where they belong.
A powerful story of belonging, identity and inheritance, What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You brings together a blazing chorus of voices to evoke Jamaica’s ghetto, dance halls, criminal underworld and corrupt politics, at the beating heart of which is a mother’s unshakeable love for her son.
An astonishing book. In riveting, irresistible prose, Sharma Taylor's genre-crossing novel (a love story, a crime story, a yard fiction) tells a tale of Jamaica and America, of class, colour, race, history and the dignity of the dispossessed. The authenticity of its detail produces a searing truth that convicts us. The largeness of its vision challenges our ideas of what it means to be human.
Curdella Forbes, author of A Tall History of Sugar
Warm, wise, unflinching. Taylor's skill with character and voice shines in this immersive story of living and loving under the shadow of betrayal.
Karen Lord, author of Redemption in Indigo
Truth-telling! Taylor's debut is tender, violent and uncompromising in turns. A vivid and authentic Jamaica that tells a tale too often hidden, for fantasies of sun, sea and sand.
Leone Ross, author of This One Sky Day
A sharp polyphonous story in which Taylor skillfully moves the reader through a world pulsing with pain, love, power, violence and tenderness. We are reminded of that tension between where we come from and what we gravitate towards, what steers us and why. An exciting read.
Yewande Omotoso, author of The Woman Next Door