At once cinematic yet intimate, Broughtupsy is an enthralling debut novel about a young Jamaican woman grappling with grief as she discovers her family, her home, is always just out of reach

Told through an intimate and atmospheric first-person account, Broughtupsy is a queer diasporic chronicle of twenty-year-old Akúa’s return to her native Kingston, Jamaica, after living in the U.S. then Canada in the decade following her mother’s death.

The reason for Akúa’s return is a woeful one: her younger brother Bryson has just passed from sickle cell anemia, the same sickness that took their mother. Unmoored and in mourning, Akúa returns to Kingston to hopefully reconnect with her estranged older sister Tamika, her last living sibling, and to bring her brother home. As the two sisters visit significant places from their childhood, Akúa is confronted with the difficult realities of being gay in a deeply religious family, of feeling separate from her home culture after years of living abroad, and of battling the grief of losing her mother then brother at pivotal moments in her young life. Along the way, she meets Jayda, a bashful queer woman who shows her a different side of Kingston and gives her a glimmer of hope of how to be at peace with her sister and herself.

At its core, Broughtupsy asks us: what are we willing to do for family? What are we willing to do to savor the feeling of home?

BIO

Named a “Writer to Watch” by CBC Books and Shondaland, Christina Cooke is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, PRISM International, Prairie Schooner, Apogee, Electric Literature, Epiphany, Split Lip, Lambda Literary Review, and others. A MacDowell Fellow and Journey Prize winner, she holds a Master of Arts from the University of New Brunswick, a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was named the inaugural Poets & Writers Fellow at Vermont Studio Center. Christina was born in Jamaica and is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City. BROUGHTUPSY is her debut novel.

REVIEWS

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Elle, Goodreads, Write or Die, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Lambda Literary Review, Bookshop, and LGBTQ Reads

“Cooke’s vibrant debut novel is a queer coming-of-age story and a chronicle of diasporic rediscovery.” -- Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic

“[T]alent is very much in evidence in Broughtupsy, which unfolds with a casual intensity, a lifelike meandering narrative which captures the quality of the visit between the sisters, gradually building to its dramatic climax. The story weaves effortlessly between present and past, showing—often at a single glance—historic events and their effect in the present. It’s a dizzying, compelling effect, and one which Cooke achieves with a deceptive ease . . . Broughtupsy is a powerful account of an attempt to find a place, both in the physical world, and deep within the self.” —Robert Wiersema, The Toronto Star

“The idea of ‘going home’ is, for many members of the LGBTQ+ community, a complicated one. Take, for example, Akúa, the protagonist of Christina Cooke’s debut novel, Broughtupsy, who returns to Jamaica from Canada to connect with her sister after the loss of their younger brother. Akúa is soon forced to question what it means to belong as a young, queer, grief-stricken woman doing her best to heal. Cooke’s narration, at once poetic and conversational, lends Akúa’s story a sense of urgency and resonance.” -- Emma Specter, Vogue

“This is a deft debut overflowing with emotion.” -- Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

“A dazzling symphony of what it means to love, to grieve, and to belong.” -- Sarah Neilson, Shondaland 

[H]  Catapult  /  January 23, 2024

0.9" H x 8.4" L x 5.7" W (0.88 lbs) 240 pages

[P]  Catapult  /  January 27, 2025

0.6" H x 8.4" L x 5.4" W (0.55 lbs) 240 pages