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Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half Scot, half African father, grows up motherless in the care of her father's laundress. Haunted by loneliness and emotionally bereft, she is a child who revels in sensuality, rich colors, earthy smells, and silken textures. She will be seduced as a schoolgirl, entered into a passionate affair with a stevedore, and marry an English doctor whose first wife she is said to have poisoned. But it is Xuela's search for knowledge about her Carib mother that becomes her obsession. Piecing together a portrait of the woman she has never seen, she imagines her mother meeting her father, she imagines her life and her feelings, she imagines her as a part of a dying race... and looks for herself within the picture in the most lush and enigmatic of Jamaica Kincaid's novels–-a stunning, spare, and magnificent work about race, sex, and love. But