Broughtupsy

At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach

Told through an intimate and atmospheric first-person account, Broughtupsy is a queer diasporic chronicle of twenty-year-old Akúa’s return to her native Kingston, Jamaica, after living in the U.S. then Canada in the decade following her mother’s death.

The reason for Akúa’s return is a woeful one: her younger brother Bryson has just passed from sickle cell anemia, the same sickness that took their mother. Unmoored and in mourning, Akúa returns to Kingston to hopefully reconnect with her estranged older sister Tamika, her last living sibling, and to bring her brother home. As the two sisters visit significant places from their childhood, Akúa is confronted with the difficult realities of being gay in a deeply religious family, of feeling separate from her home culture after years of living abroad, and of battling the grief of losing her mother then brother at pivotal moments in her young life. Along the way, she meets Jayda, a bashful queer woman who shows her a different side of Kingston and gives her a glimmer of hope of how to be at peace with her sister and herself.

At its core, Broughtupsy asks us: what are we willing to do for family? What are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?

CHRISTINA COOKE’s writing has previously appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, PRISM international, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, Journey Prize winner, and Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award winner, she holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Jamaica, Christina is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City.