The Day I Fell Off My Island by Yvonne Bailey-Smith

A story of reluctant immigration and the relationship between children and the people who parent them, The Day I Fell Off My Island is engrossing, courageous and psychologically insightful. Yvonne Bailey-Smith writes with great warmth and humanity as she explores estrangement, transition and, ultimately, the triumph of resilience and hope.

A psychotherapist and former social worker, she explains:

‘As an immigrant child, I often wished that someone had been able to take me aside and explain to me that leaving everything I knew to go on a so-called adventure to somewhere way beyond my imagination was going to cause me an unimaginable sense of loss and sadness. I also wish that the same person had been there to reassure me that I would survive and even flourish, given half a chance.’

'The richest, and most unusual, feature of the novel, is that the dialogue is written in Jamaican patois... It’s a bold stylistic decision, which draws you into a different way of life – one that is bright and vivacious, but also God-fearing and bound by a tight social etiquette… Though terrible things do happen in it, The Day I Fell Off My Island is a kind and forgiving novel… The book is threaded through with social issues that its author has encountered in more than 40 years as a social worker and psychotherapist: mental illness, domestic violence and, of course, the corrosive results of racism, but she was determined not to make Erna a helpless victim.' Claire Armitstead in The Observer