WINDWARD HEIGHTS.
Edition: Advance Reading Copy (trade paperback format. )
New York: SOHO Press, (1999.). SIGNED first edition - A retelling of 'Wuthering Heights' set in nineteenth century Cuba and Conde's native island of Guadalupe, in the years after emancipation. In commenting about this book, she stated she had long wanted to write it as a homage to the Bronte novel: "To be part of so many worlds - part of the African world because of the African slaves, part of the European world because of the European education - is a kind of double entendre. You can use that in your own way and give sentences another meaning. I was so pleased when I was doing that work, because it was a game, a kind of perverse but joyful game." Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. SIGNED on the title page by both Conde and Richard Philcox, her husband and translator. Philcox has translated most of Conde's books and Conde has both expressed her confidence in him and said that she considers him "responsible" for the book in English - that is, for the flow and rhythm and music of the language. In 2018, she was the winner of the New Academy prize in literature, a one-off award intended to fill the void left by the cancellation of that year's scandal-dogged Nobel prize for literature. In making this award, Ann Palsson, the chair of the judges, commented "She describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming. . . The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations. 348 pp.
Condition: Fine in glossy illustrated wrappers.