The Mermaid of Black Conch: The spellbinding winner of the Costa Book of the Year as read on BBC Radio 4

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One comment that I had was that I wrote it to cause social unrest and racial disharmony,” she says of Potiki. “I wasn’t a very politicised person at all.” So, what about you? How did you hear about the book, and what made you want to read it and recommend it for the podcast?

Monique Roffey is a writer of verve, vibrancy and compassion, and her work is always a joy to read.” —Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat She had inspired an outbreak of chivalry in his heart, something dangerous, if truth be told, should it run riot … She had cause his heart to wake up, to writhe free from its constraints of mistrust. Her radiance and her innocence showed him what he’d been longing for all his life …It’s really not as simple as that, Roffey points out: “I think if you unravel female jealousy, you find the patriarchy. It’s a competition for the alpha male, and we’ve ever been thus. Our patriarchy is highly internalised.” As you can see above, this novel does not need my endorsement but I am going to give it anyway. I listened to the audiobook which worked very well with the structure of this book. A part of it is written as a journal of David Baptiste, a part is narrated in 3rd person and one smaller part, written in free verse, represents the direct thoughts of the mermaid

One result of that internalisation has been the “madwoman in the attic trope”, which was transported into Caribbean literature by Jean Rhys via her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which reinvents the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre as a white Creole. “I think we’ve had enough of this historic, hysterical Freudian woman,” says Roffey. “I have every respect for Rhys, but we need new, different types of characters coming out of the region. He wanted to keep her safe, always. But he also suspected that wasn’t what she wanted, or needed. In fact, now she had the sneakers, he expected her to disappear some day, just like she appeared”. And so I find this quite interesting, to your point, and it’s interesting and telling that this is the conclusion people drew and, to a certain extent continue, to draw about who is displacing the Māori family in the book. We wouldn’t know that this wasn’t her intention if we hadn’t heard it from her in the article. But considering that we did find it too, we found those connections to events happening within our own communities. It’s definitely a point that we could probably spend a whole episode dissecting as it relates to this in literature and being culture bearers. We can do better than this.” He looked her way, “This?” “History or love. One must win. I cannot fight history. I cannot. You win. I’m bad. I always will be. But we can do better letting history win out over love.”

For me, life is made up of numerous influential voices and ideas: Buddhist dharma; the Caribbean lexicon; the tarot; text-speak; the secular world of London; the East End and its mosques and multiple immigrant histories, a part of London with its own vernacular… My life feels utterly fluid and diverse and yet works as a whole. So, everyday life shows me a non-linear form and that it’s utterly viable to compile a novel in the same way, to reflect this … David upon hearing about the capture of the Mermaid heads to the jetty, cuts her down and takes her home. He doesn’t have a plan, but he knows he cannot let the Mermaid come to ruin, he also knows doing this may lead to his ruin, but he takes the chance. This book was unique, intriguing and beautiful. But it was also very melancholic, and there was much sorrow and sad moments.