Join us as Donna Hemans, an award-winning writer from Jamaica and Washington, D.C., reads from her new novel, Tea by the Sea, described by bestselling author Marlon James as “a powder keg of a novel, where secrets and lies explode into truth and consequences, all told with spellbinding, shattering power.”
We go live here at 7:30 pm British time on Monday 12 October as Hemans read from her novel then answers questions from WiC’s Carole Burns and our live online audience, part of the University’s Black History Month programme.
From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces a mother’s circuitous route to finding the daughter taken from her at birth.
A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth, an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see, a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unraveling.
Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is also the author of the novel River Woman, winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, her second novel, won her the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, and was listed in Ms. Magazine’s “June 2020 Reads for the Rest of Us.”
