The Mermaid of Black Conch

March 1, 2022

Literary author Roffey's Costa Book of the Year Award winner is a feminist retelling of an old Taino myth BISACed as Fairy Tales/Romance/Historical Fiction and amplified by a condemnation of colonization in the Caribbean. In the 1970s, David is fishing off the island of Black Conch when he rescues a mermaid netted by some raucous tourists from the States. Actually, she's a beautiful young Taino woman named Aycayia who was cursed centuries ago by envious wives to take the form of a sea creature. As she comes to live with David, who falls in love with her, she takes on human form and begins relearning human ways while bearing witness to the devastation wrought by empire.

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May 15, 2022
The mermaid is drawn to the surface by David Baptiste's guitar. She's been making her lonely way through the ocean for 1,000 years, ever since she was transformed by a curse and exiled from her island with an old woman who was turned into a turtle for speaking uncomfortable truths. The young fisherman treats her gently, but in April 1976, a father and son from Florida come to the Caribbean island of Black Conch for a fishing competition. Instead of a marlin, they reel in the mermaid. David steals her away from the greedy and lustful fishermen, bringing her back to his home, where slowly she sheds her scales and becomes a woman again. As she learns to walk and talk, befriends a local boy who speaks sign language, and begins to wonder what it would be like to be with David, the island community's suspicions about this mystery woman grow. Achingly evocative, the Black Conch mermaid's story and the people she meets after her return from the sea powerfully capture the nature of longing and belonging.

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May 15, 2022
In this Costa Award-winning novel, the discovery of a mermaid makes waves on a fictional Caribbean island. In 1976, during an annual fishing competition in the waters off Black Conch, a creature is hauled aboard a whaler called Dauntless. The boat is owned by a White father-and-son duo who have come from Florida to take part in the competition. David Baptiste, a local Black fisherman, is the only one who knows that a strange creature lurks in the water, so when she's strung up on the jetty and left to bleed out by the astonished but proud Americans, it's Baptiste who performs a stealthy rescue. In his saltwater-filled bathtub, the mermaid begins transforming back into a woman. Over time, Baptiste learns her story: Belonging to the Indigenous Taino people, the mermaid, Aycayia, was once a woman who was cursed to her fate by other women in her village. As she relearns human life, taught to read by Baptiste's White landlady, Arcadia Rain, and befriended by Arcadia's young Deaf son, Aycayia wonders whether, through her millennialong exile in the sea, she has managed to shake off her curse and connect again to the land of her people. Told through journal entries written by Baptiste decades after the events, verse snippets from Aycayia, and omniscient narration swirling through a core group of characters, the mermaid's melancholy tale is a clear colonial allegory, the story of an island nation and its history of Indigenous people vanishing, slavery, European domination, and independence, with an uneasy and watchful present relationship between the White and Black islanders. These relationships, especially, are keenly observed and wrought: Roffey herself was born in Trinidad to a British father and a European mother who was born in Egypt, and she identifies as binational and White Creole. A mournful tour through Caribbean history via one of its most indelible legends.

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June 27, 2022
Roffey (The Tryst) spins a vivid phantasmagorical fairy tale based on a pre-Columbian Taino legend. In 1976, a white Floridian banker and his son take a fishing expedition off a fictional Caribbean island called Black Conch. Instead of a marlin, they hook a mermaid with Indigenous complexion and tattoos. The father imagines selling her to a museum or to Sea World. David Baptiste, a dreadlocked local fisherman who has previously serenaded the inquisitive creature, looks on in horror as the men stick her with a gaffing hook and knock her unconscious. That night, David cuts her bonds and takes her to his home. He means to return her to the sea as soon as possible, but while she is lying in salt water in David’s bathtub, she transforms into a young woman and the two become lovers. It turns out the mermaid, whose name is Aycayia, is not only in danger of being returned to the Americans by the authorities, but is subjected to a 1,000-year-old curse. As Aycayia acclimates to life on land and she and David fall in love, the pair must navigate a host of perils and determine if there’s a future for Aycayia outside the sea—and, if so, what it would be. With a lilting patois and rollicking prose, Roffey evokes the Antillean settings, characters, and culture. This makes for an entrancing siren song.