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The heroine of Diana McCaulay’s A House For Miss Pauline is 99-year-old Pauline Evadne Sinclair, who is quite a charmer, to say the least. Hailing from the district of Mason Hall, Miss Pauline is not charming with the traditional “nice little old lady” vibe, but rather, she is part rascal, part sage, with guts, grit, spunk, and yes, even a few curse words when she deems it necessary.
Released on February 25 by US publishers Algonquin Books and February 27 by UK publishers Dialogue Books, A House For Miss Pauline is the sixth book from the award-winning author, and McCaulay got news recently that it has been shortlisted for the 2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.
The other books and authors who are up for the £10,000 award are Babylonia by Costanza Casati (Penguin Michael Joseph); Sycorax by Nydia Hetherington (Quercus); Redemption by Jack Jordan (Simon & Schuster); Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao (Bantam, Transworld and Penguin Random House); and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Orion Publishing Group).
“I was completely amazed. You don’t necessarily know what your publisher is sending you up for. This prize wasn’t on my list. It is now causing me to rethink what adventure writing is all about,” McCaulay told The Sunday Gleaner. “I wasn’t thinking of writing [an] adventure. It was more of a pandemic book with a pretty long gestation. Miss Pauline moved into my head years ago, and I decided to let her out. I did not have a plan or a plot as to where it would lead.”
Miss Pauline is a whole mood, and she definitely needed to be let out. This is a lady who “built her own home from the ruins of a plantation”, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The synopsis states: “As she faces her 100th birthday, the old stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages, prompting her to reckon with long-buried secrets from her past. Lyrical, funny, eerie, and urgent, infused with the patois and natural beauty of Jamaica, A House For Miss Pauline asks profound questions about ancestry, colonialism, and ownership of the places where our identities are forged.”
Miss Pauline, prospective readers are informed, “knows more than she has let on about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan – a white American man who came to Mason Hall, the rural Jamaican village where Miss Pauline resides, decades ago to claim the land on which she has lived her entire life”.
That alone spells intrigue and adventure and begs the question: Did Miss Pauline, a ganja farmer who sleeps comfortably with her machete under her pillow, somehow “unalive” Turner Buchanan?
The synopsis continues: “The whispering stones, Miss Pauline realises, are telling her that she must make peace with the past before she dies. And with the help of her American granddaughter, Justine, and Lamont, a teenager she enlists to help her navigate the mysteries of the Internet, she searches for those she has wronged. But as the people and stories of her past come to invade her present, she uncovers new secrets that reveal the generations-old intertwining of the enslaved and the plantation owners.”
McCaulay shared that the book has been receiving “a lot of attention and reviews”, more than her previous works and admitted, not surprisingly, that Miss Pauline is her favourite character. And while the novel is fiction, there is some of the author’s own family history intertwined in it.
“There are the various branches of my family... and what brought them here,” explained McCaulay, who was descended from “a Portuguese plantation owner and an enslaved West African woman”.
A renowned environmentalist, a lifelong reader, and a Gleaner columnist for many years, McCauley’s ancestors had both owned and toiled on the plantations.
“What if, then, the stones from a great house were taken by the descendants of those who laboured? What if those stones started speaking? What would they say and to whom? These questions held the genesis of A House for Miss Pauline,” McCaulay stated in a release.
While she is over the moon at being shortlisted, McCaulay doesn’t really cherish hopes of winning.
“All the other books seem to be wonderful. One in six ... I am not expecting to win, but I am looking forward to knowing the company I’m in. There was a map of the various countries that are shortlisted, and I said to myself, ‘Look at Jamaica.’ I’m glad that a Jamaican book is representing,” McCaulay, who is retired and spends her time writing, shared with The Sunday Gleaner.
The Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize spells out that they expect an adventure story “to take the reader on an epic journey, exploring new horizons – be they historical or geographical ... and keep a reader turning the pages from the very start to finish not only due to the story, but also the excellent writing””
In a review of A House For Miss Pauline, Claire Adam wrote in The Guardian, “ It kept me turning pages deep into the night and left me full of admiration at the end.”
English (US) ·