Home Home goes to school

THE new TT Young Adult (YA) novel Home Home by Lisa Allen-Agostini will be included in a national secondary schools book tour from September to December.

Home Home’s manuscript was awarded in the 2017 CODE Burt Awards for Caribbean Young Adult Literature at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain. It was first published in the Caribbean and UK by Dominican publisher Papillote Press in June this year. The rights to the book have since been acquired by US publisher Delacorte Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Delacorte’s North American edition is scheduled for publication in Spring of 2020.

Home Home is “the story of a Trinidadian girl’s journey to recovery from a mental illness after she is sent to live with her estranged, lesbian aunt and removed from anything and everyone she knows to be home,” said the Publishers Weekly rights report on August 6. The Bocas Lit Fest will co-ordinate a tour of TT schools by Home Home author Allen-Agostini and other Burt Award winners in the coming term. Allen-Agostini is an award-winning journalist, fiction writer and poet, and the author of three other books.

In partnership with CODE, the Ministry of Education and the Educational School Libraries Division of Nalis, Home Home and other Burt Award books will be distributed to the libraries of 26 secondary schools around the country. “This culturally-relevant and engaging YA novel will also be a required reading text for form three students of San Juan North Secondary School as part of a pilot project of introducing Burt Award winning books to the English Literature syllabus,” said tour co-ordinator Anna Lucie-Smith of Bocas Lit Fest.

The Bocas Lit Fest and Papillote Press will co-host a Home Home reading and discussion at the Writers’ Centre, St Clair in September. The book is available online and from Metropolitan Book Suppliers, Paper Based Bookshop and other retailers.