See Now Then

‘If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is a baked alaska in reverse, chilling on the outside, screaming hot at the center’ - New York TimesA piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness. Kincaid inhabits each of her characters – a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England – as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, non-linear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

What a writer – elegant, uncompromising, simultaneously direct and layered and complex.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.