SOURCE: “Caribbean Frost,” in New Statesman, October 11, 1996, p. 45.

In the following review, Stuart concludes that The Autobiography of My Mother is “one of the most beautifully written books I have read, and one of the most alienating.”

“My mother died at the moment I was born and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind.” So begins Kincaid's dark and disturbing novel [The Autobiography of My Mother]. It tells of Xuela Claudia Richardson, who after the death of her mother is farmed out to the local laundress, along with her father's dirty clothes, and is finally taken back into his home years later under the murderous eye of his new wife.

Xuela's road is one of “sadness and shame and pity for myself”. At 15 she embarks on an affair with one of her father's...