In Montego Bay, Jamaica, teenager Nyjah Messado witnesses a brutal assault by some of the boys in his circle of friends. Torn between the masculine code at his private all boys’ school and his own conscience, Nyjah fails to intervene, and comes of age haunted by the guilt of his inaction.

Stylistically engaging, ambitious in scope, and brimming with poetic patois, the novel takes us through a sweeping movement between the younger and more mature selves of Nyjah. We see him trying to come to terms with his own place in multiple worlds: in his family; at school, with its colonial Eurocentric ethos; and within the religion and politics of Montego Bay and the city’s criminal gangs. Similar to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Kate Walbert’s His Favorites, My Own Dear People looks unflinchingly at proclivities toward cruelty, particularly toward women and LGBTQ+ people. Dwight Thompson elevates the tradition of the coming-of-age novel by boldly examining how sexual predation crosses both gay and straight worlds.

BIO

Dwight Thompson is the award-winning author of the novel Death Register and has published short stories in PREE and the Caribbean Writer. He won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize, was short-listed for the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition, and was long-listed for the 2021 and 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. My Own Dear People is his second novel. He was born and raised in Jamaica, and currently works at an international school in Hiroshima, Japan.

REVIEWS

“Manhood, masculinity, what it means to grow up in a world where who you are and who you are expected to be exist in powerful, soul-deep struggle . . . Dwight Thompson’s My Own Dear People tackles all these issues and more, in an important, beautifully written novel about a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the actions (and inactions) of his own past. This is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time.” -- Jerry Stahl, author of Nein, Nein, Nein!

[P]  Akashic Books Ltd.  /  April 01, 2025

1.0" H x 9.2" L x 6.1" W (0.9 lbs) 344 pages