When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy’s plans don’t include her overzealous, evangelical mother―or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru. Beating with the pulse of a long-witheld confession, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself first―not to give a better life to her family back home. Patsy leaves Tru behind in a defiant act of self-preservation, hoping for a new start where she can be, and love, whomever she wants. But when Patsy arrives in Brooklyn, America is not as Cicely’s treasured letters described; to survive as an undocumented immigrant, she is forced to work as a bathroom attendant and nanny. Meanwhile, Tru builds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica, grappling with her own questions of identity and sexuality, and trying desperately to empathize with her mother’s decision. Expertly evoking the jittery streets of New York and the languid rhythms of Jamaica, Patsy weaves between the lives of Patsy and Tru in vignettes spanning more than a decade as mother and daughter ultimately find a way back to one another.
Author
Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the novels PATSY (June 4, 2019) and HERE COMES THE SUN (Liveright, 2016), which won the Lambda Literary Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. HERE COMES THE SUN was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and received “Best Book of the Year” nods from NPR, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Entertainment Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Kirkus Reviews, among others. It was named one of the best books to read in summer 2016 by the New York Times, NPR, BBC, O, The Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, Cosmo, Marie Claire, Miami Herald, BuzzFeed, Bookpage, Brooklyn Magazine, Flavorwire, Book Riot, and Bookish, among others. Time Out New York described Dennis-Benn as one of the “few immigrants and first-generation Americans who are putting their stamps on NYC,” and Vice included her in a round-up of immigrant authors “who are making American Literature great again.” Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, Ebony, Electric Literature, Mosaic, Lenny Letter, and Catapult, among others. Her writing has been awarded a Richard and Julie Logsdon Fiction Prize, and two of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Fiction. Dennis-Benn is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. She has previously taught in the writing programs at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Hurston/Wright Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant and a 2018 Caribbean Life Impact Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Dennis-Benn is a graduate of Cornell University and holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
