Jamaica Kincaid’s first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi driver who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.

Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of this island and of Mr. Potter’s days. As Kincaid’s narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid strings together a moving picture of Mr. Potter’s ancestors -- beginning with memories of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide -- and the outside world that presses in on his life, in the persons of his Lebanese employer and, later, a couple fleeing World War II. Within these surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters -- one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies -- to tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.

In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.

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“Whatever it is, it's exquisite…Jamaica Kincaid strings words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters together in such a way that one is almost compelled to think sideways and backward and forward and to stop thinking when the thinking one is thinking becomes too tangential and fragmentary to represent thought or thinking about thought when thought becomes too intense to think about its capriciousness….the one truth is in its exquisite rendering, its gorgeous recounting, its telling interstices and artful interweavings incrementally revealing the heartbreaking story of the grown daughter who did not even know she had a father in Antigua…[Mr. Potter] is nothing if not beautiful, compassionate and entirely too moving to bear too much thinking about thinking about it, so awe-inspiring and gut-wrenching are its contents.” -- Globe and Mail

“Kincaid's fiction aims to render the known and the unknowable at the same time. Her stories are built up with layers of repeated sentences and phrases, like waves pounding on the shore, leaving the reader to decipher the whole story the way a geologist might examine exposed strata of rock.” -- The Toronto Star

“It’s a fairy tale told with a biblical flavour…each word, each observation, each page echoes the one before, lulling you into a sense of surrender.” -- The Toronto Star

"Mr. Potter is Kincaid's most poetic and affecting noel to date. Kincaid writes of [Mr. Potter] as though she were speaking her breathless sentences aloud. The result is prose more emotionally charged, more repetitive, more reminiscent of Gertrude Stein than ever before." -- The Washington Post

"By seeking to understand her father and herself, her father's past and her own present, the narrator also struggles to come to terms with the complex and contradictory, at times overwhelming, fact of existence itself. The repetition in the prose, the many-angled viewings and the pauses in narration render the perpetual astonishment of the sensitive observer, as well as the discovery inherent in the process of writing. Even when Kincaid's prose is at its most lyrical, it's never gratuitous." -- Gregory Miller, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"The writing truly soars . . . Kincaid's lyricism ascends into the realm of the sublime, achieving the rhythmic and incantatory effect she's after and replicating a kind of oral storytelling via a written text." -- Andrew Roe, The San Francisco Chronicle

"As with all of Kincaid's novels, Mr. Potter may be read as a parable of colonial history . . . Mr. Potter portrays emotional poverty, reflected in often cruel, always sharp language. Kincaid's storytelling relies on repetition, building on simple phrases to create scene fragments and anecdotes . . . It gives Kincaid's story mythic heft, making Mr. Potter not merely a character, but an archetype." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Kincaid is a vibrant and mysterious poetic writer . . . To love in this slim little novel is the rich drumbeat of Kincaid's inimitable prose." -- Orlando Sentinel

"She has always been a superb stylist, but in Mr. Potter, Jamaica Kincaid's prose takes on an exalted, almost biblical tone. The writing soars and sings . . . Kincaid gives us a complex portrait, told in soaring prose, of a powerful man with little in the way of accomplishments and of the poverty-stricken island he never managed to transcend." -- Roger Harris, The Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

"Kincaid, with her gently rhythmic prose, has painted another searing portrait and has done so with typical brilliance . . . In narrating Mr. Potter's 'biography,' Elaine embraces her father, offering to him, to herself, and to the reader the beautiful gift of a life examined." -- Susanna Baird, Boston magazine

"As in her previous books, Kincaid has exquisite control over her narrator's deep-seated rage, which drives the story but never overpowers it and is tempered by a clear-eyed sympathy. Her prose here is more incantatory and hypnotic than ever . . . This is [a] taut and often spellbinding novel." -- Publishers Weekly

"What she's written, really, is a meditation on Antigua, the island where she was born, on fatherhood, motherhood, emotional cruelty. She captures moments of pure consciousness, isolating her characters, for emphasis, as only an artist can, stripping them of context, and then rebuilding their world before our very eyes: adding weather, color, song, pain and memory. This is a punishing, gorgeous book that gives life to an island, to its Middle Eastern refugees and its black business class, to its poor mothers and abandoned children . . . By the end, Kincaid has, magically, transformed the reader's consciousness." -- The Baltimore Sun

"Mr. Potter may be an illiterate taxi driver in Antigua, but the story Kincaid creates for him is as rich and complex as that of any aristocrat." -- Library Journal

"Like Kincaid's Lucy and Autobiography of My Mother, her latest is a meditation on the invisible bonds -- the ties of family and island community -- that weigh on her characters, and on the strains of history simmering below the plot's deceptively tranquil surface. Here is the recurring message beneath all the rhythmic run-on sentences: the saving power of written word. Which is, of course, the familiar leitmotif of all of Kincaid's mesmerizing work." -- Time Out New York

"Astonishing . . . gorgeous . . . Kincaid is a fierce, idiosyncratic stylist, piling up emphatic sentences to achieve a mesmerizing poetry." -- Paul Evans, Book

"Like waves, Kincaid's language keeps doubling back hypnotically, picking up details and nuances along the way . . . Conjuring his name repeatedly, she brings Mr. Potter into the light. In writing his story, Kincaid makes him unflinchingly real." -- People

“A hypnotically repetitious narrative telling of a sunbaked island Antigua and the community that has washed up on it, as seen through the eyes of an illiterate taxi driver.” -- The Bookseller

“Kincaid continues to write with a unique, compelling voice that cannot be found anywhere else. Her small books are worth a pile of thicker -- and hollower -- ones.” -- Jeffrey Rodger, The San Francisco Chronicle

“Ms. Kincaid writes with passion and conviction…[with] a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.” -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Writers wish for perfect readers, but readers wish even harder for perfect writers and rarely find them…Jamaica Kincaid is about as perfect as it’s possible to be.” -- Carolyn See, The Washington Post

“[Kincaid] is a consummate balancer of feeling and craft. She takes no short cuts or long cuts, breathes no windy pomposities: she connects herself with being direct…So lush, composed, direct, off, sharp, and brilliantly lit are Kincaid’s word paintings that the reader’s presuppositions are cut in two by her seemingly soft edges.” -- Jacqueline Austin, Voice Literary Supplement

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Mr. Potter is Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel in six years. Her other works include The Autobiography of My Mother, her last novel, and My Brother, a memoir for which she was awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger in 2000. She lives with her family in Vermont.

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