Diana McCaulay – Carol's Notebook

Author: 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.

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...