A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay Narrator: Sasha Frost
Published by Algonquin Books on February 25, 2025
Source: NetGalley
Genres: Fiction
Length: 10 hrs 15 mins
Pages: 320
Format: Audiobook
Purchase at Bookshop.org or Audible
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Starring an unforgettably fierce 99-year-old Jamaican heroine, A House for Miss Pauline is a transporting and tender story with a mystery at its heart that asks profound and urgent questions about who owns the land on which our identities are forged. For readers of Nicole Dennis-Benn, James McBride, and other stories about colonialism and personal history.
When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, Pauline Sinclair, age ninety-nine, knows she will not make it to her 100th birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, surviving by becoming one of the most successful ganja farmers in the area, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved “baby father” Clive.
Behind this seemingly benign façade, however, Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan—a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land as his and his children’s. The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realizes, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies.
With help from her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to drive her around the island, she sets off to find the people she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she discovers that there are shocking secrets even she could not have anticipated.
Lyrical, funny, eerie, and profound, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House for Miss Pauline tells a timely and nuanced story about identity, colonialism, and land—and introduces an unforgettable heroine who is a model for living life on her own terms.
I listened to A House for Miss Pauline on audio, which I think was a different experience for me than it would have been in print. A lot of the dialogue and inner thoughts are written in Patois, and the narrator’s convincing Jamaican accent made it flow better and gave it much more of a sense of place than reading in print would have. I wouldn’t have taken the time with the language that the audio forces me too. It’s too easy for me to skim over bits when I’m reading an ebook or hardback, but I always listen to audios at 1.0X, never sped up.
And this is a good book to take time with. Pauline Sinclair is 99 years old and has spent her whole life in the rural Jamaican village of Mason Hall. When the stones of her house start moving and speaking to her during the night, she knows it’s time to take stock of her life and maybe make some things right before she dies.
Miss Pauline is a fabulous character. She’s tough and loyal and has fought for everything she has. She’s lost people she’s loved and made difficult decisions. But she is also still open to meeting and caring about new people. Her relationships with family, both biological and found, are rich and sometimes complicated.
As a book, it can feel meandering, but I mean that in a good way. Miss Pauline has lived a long life and as she looks back over it, certain times and incidents stand out, some dramatic and some sweet. Through her stories, we also see Jamaica’s history – slavery, colonialism, natural disasters, labor disputes. It’s definitely more character based than plot focused.
This one was a little outside of what I typically read, but I loved Miss Pauline and thoroughly enjoyed the book.
About Diana McCaulay
Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican environmental activist and writer, a lifelong resident of the capital city of Kingston. Her sixth novel, A HOUSE FOR MISS PAULINE, will be published by Dialogue Books in the UK and Algonquin Books in the USA in February 2025.
Diana has also self published a collection of her newspaper columns called WRITING JAMAICA. She has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region twice, in 2012 and 2022, and most recently, won the Elizabeth Nunez Short Story Prize for writers resident in the Caribbean at the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival in New York in September 2024. She was awarded the Norman Washington Manley Award in 2021 for Excellence for Protection and Preservation of the Environment and in 2022, a Gold Musgrave Medal for distinguished eminence in the field of literature by the Council of the Institute of Jamaica.
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