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Three books that put you in the Bahamas. Two are by writers from the Bahamas and set there: Facing the Sun and If I Had the Wings. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Bahamian literature comes from an archipelago of about 700 islands, independent from Britain since 1973, and little of it reaches readers abroad. With fewer than half a million people, the country has a small home market for books. Writers work in English, and the contrast between Nassau and the remote Family Islands runs through much of what they write about.
Janice Lynn Mather's Facing the Sun is the place to start: a young adult novel in which a developer buys a stretch of beach and four young women face changes of their own. Helen Klonaris's If I Had the Wings gathers stories of growing up in the small Greek-Bahamian community, with close attention to family, faith and sexuality. Out Island Doctor, by Evans W. Cottman, an Indiana schoolteacher who moved to the Bahamas in middle age, recalls his years treating patients in remote settlements.
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When a developer buys the stretch of Nassau beach they've always known, four young women in the Bahamas face their own changes, in a YA coming-of-age novel about friendship, family and who paradise is really for.
Stories of Bahamian family, memory, sexuality and women's lives, set in Nassau and the wider islands, showing a modern Bahamian society.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for the Bahamas.
A memoir of a doctor's years tending remote Out Island settlements, showing the daily life, hardships and close communities of the 1950s Family Islands.
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