My Brother

Finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Jamaica Kincaid’s brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid’s incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother’s life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer’s mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

Jamaica Kincaid’s books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. She lives in Vermont.