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Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
Nalo Hopkinson
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection.”
—Foreword
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful.
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring) is an internationally beloved storyteller. This long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes.
[STARRED REVIEW] “A joyous celebration of Hopkinson’s abiding legacy as a titan of both speculative fiction and Caribbean literature.” —Publishers Weekly
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection.”
—Foreword
In Nalo Hopkinson’s first collection of stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien life-form; a trans woman at a funeral might be haunted by more than just bad memories; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome and most needed.
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful.
A Foreword Book of the Day Parade Best New Book Releases
“Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions is a treasure box, a mojo pot of stories to break your heart and mend it too. Nalo Hopkinson’s fables, ghost tales, alien encounters, and automaton adventures are a sheer delight. Magic on the page. Hopkinson’s language carries you to revelation and joy. Characters you’ve been lusting after do tricks with your mind. These dazzling stories will reacquaint you with your spirits.”
—Andrea Hairston, author of Archangels of Funk
“Jamaica Ginger is a powerful and salient reminder of just how amazing a storyteller we are graced with in the form of Nalo Hopkinson! This carefully curated collection is a tapestry of Nalo’s mastery and truly displays what a master of the form can do.”
—John Jennings, New York Times bestselling author and Hugo Award-winning comics creator
[STARRED REVIEW] “Obliterating the boundary between science and folk knowledge, this collection of 15 speculative shorts from SFWA Grandmaster Hopkinson (Blackheart Man) rewards and challenges readers in equal measure. In the beautifully multilayered ‘Clap Back,’ an artist uses nanotechnology and bacterial reproduction to reclaim racist memorabilia. The cheerfully gruesome ‘Inselberg,’ follows vacationers on an unexpected island tour, narrated in patois by their guide. In the title story, cowritten with Nisi Shawl, a young woman transcends the path laid out for her in an alternate version of post-emancipation New Orleans. Hopkinson’s singular voice shines throughout these thought-provoking flights of imagination. In centering the historically marginal experiences of Black and queer workers, islanders, mothers, the old and the very young, she articulates the prevalent fears and concerns of those communities, including sea level rise, the distribution of power, and degradations of industry. Complete with contextual notes from the author and a loving foreword from Nisi Shawl, this is a joyous celebration of Hopkinson’s abiding legacy as a titan of both speculative fiction and Caribbean literature. —Publishers Weekly
“I had encountered some of Nalo Hopkinson’s stories before starting this collection and admired them. So it’s with pleasure I can say this is another varied set with which she shows a talent for making strange and thought-provoking tales with concerns including Western and Caribbean cultures, gender, climate change and adaptation and resilience.”
—Too Many Fantasy Books
“Jamaica Ginger is a mélange of stories that spins together roots, dreams, and powerful tales the way only Nalo can. It’s easy to get lost in the verses and images that drip from the page. A must read.”
—Tobias Buckell, author of A Stranger in the Citadel
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection, Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions blends ecological awareness, cultural heritage, and fantastical happenings… Climate change is a recurring theme: there are diseased, parched landscapes and ravaging floods. Many of the characters are resourceful women of color who are determined to improve their troubled environments; they summon remarkable scientific, technological, and mechanical abilities to heal others and solve problems. Enriched with a marrow of emotion, the short stories of Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions move beyond bleak dystopian landscapes into a curious universe marked by damage and possibility.”
—Foreword
5/5 Stars. “Nalo Hopkinson is one of the most influential and essential speculative fiction authors currently writing. The stories in this collection prove why.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“[Hopkinson’s] worlds captivate not only for her deft lyricism, but also for the way they keenly investigate both a here-and-now and there-and-soon rife with quotidian violence, quiet musings, sensuous bodies, queer Blackness, raucous laughter, grief, rage, hope: in short, they are the force and intensity of living.”
—Kimberly Bain, writer and critic
“Each story in Jamaica Ginger surprises and delights. Nalo Hopkinson repeatedly draws on wild magic to examine human experiences so familiar that the tales feel like they’re shaped from collective memories.”
—Emily Pohl-Weary, author of Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl and How to Be Found
“In the engaging Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, the reader takes a journey both through story and the art of writing, as Hopkinson (Blackheart Man, 2024) shares the genesis of each tale in the story’s introduction. Most stories reflect the author’s Caribbean heritage and were previously published in various anthologies and magazines, but are collected together here for the first time. ‘Covenant’ provides hope for a world affected by climate change by showing what humanity can build when we work together, while the disturbing ‘Inselberg’ shows what happens when the waters rise unchecked. In ‘Ally,’ a funeral brings together a trans woman and her friend, who might just be haunted by more than bad memories. The creepy ‘Clap Back’ ensures that the story of the African diaspora will be told, across all types of mediums. And the title story, cowritten with Nisi Shawl, mixes steampunk, Pullman porters, and a deadly drink into an adventure-filled romp. This is only scratching the surface of this wildly inventive collection, perfect for fans of Karen Lord, Tobias S. Buckell, and Tananarive Due.”
—Booklist
“It’s time to celebrate! Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring and The Salt Roads, returns with her first story collection in almost a decade.”
—Book Riot
“Hopkinson is incredible.”
—MI Book Reviews
“Jamaica Ginger is, in fact, art itself, and the ways in which art forms dialogue with each other…. Hopkinson’s imagination is both unique and singularly important.”
—Locus
“Hopkinson throws a bowling ball down the middle of the genre. She strikes and strikes and strikes again.”
—Green Man Review
“A true grandmaster. This collection of marvelous, delicious concoctions is a joy to read.”
—Mondo Ernesto
5/5 stars. “A Caribbean/Canadian author, (who also spent time in Trinidad and Guyana), Nalo offers up stories of beauty and wonder, often with an environmental slant.”
—Chars Horror Corner
“This collection was a treat.”
—Booklover’s Boudoir
“Hopkinson builds alternative and just worlds, where people are free to be themselves; and when she isn’t doing that, she’s creating critical commentary on the unjust one we have built.”
—Harare Review
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen.
Hopkinson’s novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos and most recently, Sister Mine. She has edited four anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and the British Fantasy Award-winning People Of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! anthology co-edited with Kristine Ong Muslim. She was the lead author of House of Whispers, a serialized comic in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe.
In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl in the Ring was also nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and received the John W. Campbell and Locus awards for Best First Novel. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon’s Arms won the Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice, and Canada’s Prix Aurora Award. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the youngest and the first woman of African descent to receive this lifetime honor.
Her fantasy novel Blackheart Man is forthcoming from Saga Press in August 2024. She is also collaborating as script writer with artists John Jennings (I Am Alfonso Jones) and Stephen Bissette (The Swamp Thing) on Night Comes Walking, a horror graphic novel forthcoming from Megascope, an imprint of Abrams ComicArts.
Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” She has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at both the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, California, and Clarion West in Seattle, Washington. She currently a professor in the School of Creative Writing of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Praise for Nalo Hopkinson
“A major talent.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption.” —Globe and Mail
“One of the best fantasy authors working today.” —io9
“An exciting new voice in our literature.” —Edmonton Journal
“.Like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future.” —The News Magazine of Black America
“Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors. ” —Caribbean Travel and Life
“Hopkinson’s prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details.” —SCIFI.com
Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
Nalo Hopkinson
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection.”
—Foreword
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful.
Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions
by Nalo Hopkinson
ISBN: 978-1-61696-426-9 (print); 978-1-61696-427-6 (digital)
Published: October 29. 2024
Available Format(s): trade paperback, ebook
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring) is an internationally beloved storyteller. This long-awaited new collection of her deeply imaginative short fiction offers striking journeys to far-flung futures and fantastical landscapes.
[STARRED REVIEW] “A joyous celebration of Hopkinson’s abiding legacy as a titan of both speculative fiction and Caribbean literature.”
—Publishers Weekly
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection.”
—Foreword
In Nalo Hopkinson’s first collection of stories since 2015, a woman and her cyborg pig eke out a living in a future waterworld; two scientists contemplate the cavernous remains of an alien life-form; a trans woman at a funeral might be haunted by more than just bad memories; and an artist creates nanotechnology that asserts Blackness where it is least welcome and most needed.
Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as having “an imagination that most of us would kill for,” Hopkinson and her Afro-Caribbean, Canadian, and American influences shine in truly unique stories that are gorgeously strange, inventively subversive, and vividly beautiful.
A Foreword Book of the Day
Parade Best New Book Releases
“Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions is a treasure box, a mojo pot of stories to break your heart and mend it too. Nalo Hopkinson’s fables, ghost tales, alien encounters, and automaton adventures are a sheer delight. Magic on the page. Hopkinson’s language carries you to revelation and joy. Characters you’ve been lusting after do tricks with your mind. These dazzling stories will reacquaint you with your spirits.”
—Andrea Hairston, author of Archangels of Funk
“Jamaica Ginger is a powerful and salient reminder of just how amazing a storyteller we are graced with in the form of Nalo Hopkinson! This carefully curated collection is a tapestry of Nalo’s mastery and truly displays what a master of the form can do.”
—John Jennings, New York Times bestselling author and Hugo Award-winning comics creator
[STARRED REVIEW] “Obliterating the boundary between science and folk knowledge, this collection of 15 speculative shorts from SFWA Grandmaster Hopkinson (Blackheart Man) rewards and challenges readers in equal measure. In the beautifully multilayered ‘Clap Back,’ an artist uses nanotechnology and bacterial reproduction to reclaim racist memorabilia. The cheerfully gruesome ‘Inselberg,’ follows vacationers on an unexpected island tour, narrated in patois by their guide. In the title story, cowritten with Nisi Shawl, a young woman transcends the path laid out for her in an alternate version of post-emancipation New Orleans. Hopkinson’s singular voice shines throughout these thought-provoking flights of imagination. In centering the historically marginal experiences of Black and queer workers, islanders, mothers, the old and the very young, she articulates the prevalent fears and concerns of those communities, including sea level rise, the distribution of power, and degradations of industry. Complete with contextual notes from the author and a loving foreword from Nisi Shawl, this is a joyous celebration of Hopkinson’s abiding legacy as a titan of both speculative fiction and Caribbean literature.
—Publishers Weekly
“I had encountered some of Nalo Hopkinson’s stories before starting this collection and admired them. So it’s with pleasure I can say this is another varied set with which she shows a talent for making strange and thought-provoking tales with concerns including Western and Caribbean cultures, gender, climate change and adaptation and resilience.”
—Too Many Fantasy Books
“Jamaica Ginger is a mélange of stories that spins together roots, dreams, and powerful tales the way only Nalo can. It’s easy to get lost in the verses and images that drip from the page. A must read.”
—Tobias Buckell, author of A Stranger in the Citadel
[STARRED REVIEW] “A commanding short story collection, Caribbean Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions blends ecological awareness, cultural heritage, and fantastical happenings… Climate change is a recurring theme: there are diseased, parched landscapes and ravaging floods. Many of the characters are resourceful women of color who are determined to improve their troubled environments; they summon remarkable scientific, technological, and mechanical abilities to heal others and solve problems. Enriched with a marrow of emotion, the short stories of Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions move beyond bleak dystopian landscapes into a curious universe marked by damage and possibility.”
—Foreword
5/5 Stars. “Nalo Hopkinson is one of the most influential and essential speculative fiction authors currently writing. The stories in this collection prove why.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“[Hopkinson’s] worlds captivate not only for her deft lyricism, but also for the way they keenly investigate both a here-and-now and there-and-soon rife with quotidian violence, quiet musings, sensuous bodies, queer Blackness, raucous laughter, grief, rage, hope: in short, they are the force and intensity of living.”
—Kimberly Bain, writer and critic
“Each story in Jamaica Ginger surprises and delights. Nalo Hopkinson repeatedly draws on wild magic to examine human experiences so familiar that the tales feel like they’re shaped from collective memories.”
—Emily Pohl-Weary, author of Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl and How to Be Found
“In the engaging Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, the reader takes a journey both through story and the art of writing, as Hopkinson (Blackheart Man, 2024) shares the genesis of each tale in the story’s introduction. Most stories reflect the author’s Caribbean heritage and were previously published in various anthologies and magazines, but are collected together here for the first time. ‘Covenant’ provides hope for a world affected by climate change by showing what humanity can build when we work together, while the disturbing ‘Inselberg’ shows what happens when the waters rise unchecked. In ‘Ally,’ a funeral brings together a trans woman and her friend, who might just be haunted by more than bad memories. The creepy ‘Clap Back’ ensures that the story of the African diaspora will be told, across all types of mediums. And the title story, cowritten with Nisi Shawl, mixes steampunk, Pullman porters, and a deadly drink into an adventure-filled romp. This is only scratching the surface of this wildly inventive collection, perfect for fans of Karen Lord, Tobias S. Buckell, and Tananarive Due.”
—Booklist
“It’s time to celebrate! Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring and The Salt Roads, returns with her first story collection in almost a decade.”
—Book Riot
“Hopkinson is incredible.”
—MI Book Reviews
“Jamaica Ginger is, in fact, art itself, and the ways in which art forms dialogue with each other…. Hopkinson’s imagination is both unique and singularly important.”
—Locus
“Hopkinson throws a bowling ball down the middle of the genre. She strikes and strikes and strikes again.”
—Green Man Review
“A true grandmaster. This collection of marvelous, delicious concoctions is a joy to read.”
—Mondo Ernesto
5/5 stars. “A Caribbean/Canadian author, (who also spent time in Trinidad and Guyana), Nalo offers up stories of beauty and wonder, often with an environmental slant.”
—Chars Horror Corner
“This collection was a treat.”
—Booklover’s Boudoir
“Hopkinson builds alternative and just worlds, where people are free to be themselves; and when she isn’t doing that, she’s creating critical commentary on the unjust one we have built.”
—Harare Review
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen.
Hopkinson’s novels include Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos and most recently, Sister Mine. She has edited four anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction and the British Fantasy Award-winning People Of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! anthology co-edited with Kristine Ong Muslim. She was the lead author of House of Whispers, a serialized comic in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Universe.
In 1997, Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring. Brown Girl in the Ring was also nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and received the John W. Campbell and Locus awards for Best First Novel. Her collection Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. The New Moon’s Arms won the Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author to receive the award twice, and Canada’s Prix Aurora Award. In 2020, Hopkinson was named the 37th Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, the youngest and the first woman of African descent to receive this lifetime honor.
Her fantasy novel Blackheart Man is forthcoming from Saga Press in August 2024. She is also collaborating as script writer with artists John Jennings (I Am Alfonso Jones) and Stephen Bissette (The Swamp Thing) on Night Comes Walking, a horror graphic novel forthcoming from Megascope, an imprint of Abrams ComicArts.
Hopkinson was one of the founders of the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in speculative fiction. As a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside, she was a member of a research cluster in science fiction, and of the University of California’s “Speculative Futures Collective.” She has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at both the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, California, and Clarion West in Seattle, Washington. She currently a professor in the School of Creative Writing of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Praise for Nalo Hopkinson
“A major talent.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“Nalo Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction. Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts, transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence and her commitment to a radical vision that refuses easy consumption.”
—Globe and Mail
“One of the best fantasy authors working today.”
—io9
“An exciting new voice in our literature.”
—Edmonton Journal
“.Like Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, [Hopkinson] forces us to consider how inequities of race, gender, class and power might be played out in a dystopian future.”
—The News Magazine of Black America
“Caribbean science fiction? Nalo Hopkinson is staking her claim as one of its most notable authors. ”
—Caribbean Travel and Life
“Hopkinson’s prose is a distinct pleasure to read: richly sensual, with high-voltage erotic content and gorgeous details.”
—SCIFI.com
Other books by this author…
Falling in Love with Hominids
Nalo Hopkinson
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