FSG is thrilled to share the stunning cover of Leone Ross’s new novel, Popisho, which we will publish in April 2021. It’s a lush and sensual cover—illustrated by Hayley Wall and designed by Alex Merto—for an equally lush and sensual novel.
To enter the world of Popisho is to enter a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. We’ve fallen in love with the masterful novel, and we’re not the only ones.
“Popisho mixes lush, descriptive prose with the unrepentant wildness of folktales. Hands that can heal, palms that glow silver, body parts that abruptly fall off even though their owners keep living abound here. The fierceness of this novel in its imagery, in its ideas about women, the way it spoke to so many concerns of now, drew me in, but the caramel of the relationships, the way Leone Ross writes about intimacy, kept me enthralled.” —Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood
“I feel like I have been waiting my whole life to read a novel this expansive, this generous, this full of magic and massive personality. Leone Ross is a marvel of a writer, and this book absolutely bespelled me.” —Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You
Everyone in Popisho was born . . . with a little something . . . The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing that felt so inexpressibly your own.
Somewhere far away—or maybe right nearby—lies an archipelago called Popisho. A place of stunning beauty and incorrigible mischief, destiny and mystery, it is also a place in need of change.
Xavier Redchoose is the macaenus of his generation, anointed by the gods to make each resident one perfect meal when the time is right. Anise, his long lost love, is on a march toward reckoning with her healing powers. The governor’s daughter, Sonteine, is getting married, her father demanding a feast out of turn. And graffiti messages from an unknown source are asking hard questions. A storm is brewing. Before it comes, before the end of the day, this wildly imaginative narrative will take us across the islands, their history, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.
Popisho is a masterful delight: a playful love story, a portrait of community, a boldly sensual meditation on desire and addiction, and a critique of the legacies of corruption and colonialism. Inspired by the author’s Jamaican homeland, inflected with rhythms and textures of an amalgam of languages, it is a dazzling, major work of fiction, in conversation with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy.
Leone Ross is a fiction writer, editor and academic. She was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and her second novel, Orange Laughter, was named by Wasafiri magazine as one of the most influential British novels of the last twenty-five years. Her work has also been shortlisted for the V. S. Pritchett Prize and the Edge Hill Prize. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Roehampton University in London, where she is Anthology Editor for their micropublishing house, Fincham Press. She is a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.
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