Book Reviews

The Boston Globe
I reached the end of “How to Escape from a Leper Colony’’ with the exhilarating sense that I had been on the best kind of journey - not, finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.
--Margot Livesey

O, The Oprah Magazine
"To wrap your mind around life on an island, you need to understand insularity, restlessness, the way it feels to have a fluid sense of identity. All this and more is what you get from Tiphanie Yanique's haunting and vibrant debut fiction collection,"
--Cathleen Medwick

The Watch List: 16 newcomers to watch
"I can’t remember a debut that was quite so assured. . . . It is easy to imagine Yanique’s characters in an adaptation for the stage: think ‘Our Town,’ set in the Caribbean, but with raw language and stories full of violence and sexuality. Plus it’s funny, too. Are you listening, Oprah?"
--THE BOSTON GLOBE, "16 up-and-comers who might make it big in 2010"

The effects of colonialism throb in Yanique’s vivid debut collection. . . Yanique penetrates the perils and pleasures of lives lived outside resort walls.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"With turns to the wild, clever, and magical that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new voice."
—PERCIVAL EVERETT

"Tiphanie Yanique is a writer to watch. Although How to Escape from a Leper Colony is her debut, she writes with the wisdom and confidence of an old soul. The title story alone is worth the price of admission, but each of the stories contained in this gorgeous collection is clear-eyed, honest while still zinging with emotion. Tiphanie Yanique is blessed with an electric imagination, an expansive heart, and an unflinching gaze. I can't wait to see what she does next."
—TAYARI JONES

"These are fiercely original, poetic, and bold stories from a writer who is a force to be reckoned with. I loved every minute of this book and was in awe of nearly every paragraph."
—CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ, author of The World in Half

"In these powerful, poetic stories set in landscapes real and imagined, Tiphanie Yanique explores beautifully race, family, and the complicated movements of the heart."
—CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI, author of Sister of My Heart and The Palace of Illusions

"Let us hail this new literary voice, vibrant, humorous, original and powerful. These stories introduce us to a new world free of the old images and too familiar clichés of the Caribbean."
—MARYSE CONDÉ

"In this Widest of Sargasso Seas Tiphanie Yanique gives us the pan-Caribbean, from the old lepers’ colony on Chacachacare, off the coast of Trinidad, to St. John, Accra, and London. It’s an astonishing debut collection—as brutal, sexual, magical, and seductively disturbing as if Jean Rhys had written it today."
—ROBERT ANTONI

"Tiphanie Yanique has a gift for writing about physical displacement and the longing for connection that ensues. The unique stories in How to Escape from a Leper Colony meditate on confused expressions of love and spirituality in fresh and surprising ways."
—EMILY RABOTEAU

"How to Escape from a Leper Colony is fiction of the first rank. Tiphanie Yanique explores the ferociously complex terrain of her native Caribbean to show what it means to live in a world where accidents of culture, country, history, race, and place figure so bewilderingly in, as the author puts it, ‘the divine risks of love.’ Every single one of these extraordinary stories delivers a necessary revelation. So few of us can hope to see with any clarity, much less make sense of, this world, but Yanique—and we should be profoundly grateful for this—sees and understands a very great deal indeed."

—BEN FOUNTAIN

"This splendid debut collection reveals a storyteller of multiple gifts and ample heart. Yanique’s writing is very fine, her characters are authentic and memorable, and her vision is deeply humane."
—SIGRID NUNEZ

"In How to Escape from a Leper Colony, Tiphanie Yanique takes as her subject the outsider, the immigrant, the uprooted. A boy from Ghana is transplanted to Brixton, trading his palm-wine-drinking friends in Accra for new football-playing mates. A Gambian priest finds friendship in a coffin shop in the Caribbean; a one- time Pentecostal leaves her birthplace and dons a burka in an effort to win back her Muslim husband. The stories of these men and women, and the extraordinary grace and sympathy with which they’re told, serve as urgent, vivid reminders in this age of displacement and migration, of how powerfully and urgently each human heart aches for its home."
—KATHLEEN CAMBOR

"Tiphanie Yanique has written powerful stories, in luminous prose, that reveal a Caribbean beyond tourist brochures, stories that tell of human triumphs and failures. A wonderful read."
—ELIZABETH NUNEZ, author of Anna In-Between