Charmaine Wilkerson, a former journalist who is based in Rome, on her debut novel which is this month's buzziest release.
It’s Wilkerson’s first novel, after a career in journalism and news and communications. Born in New York, Wilkerson moved to Jamaica as a child, which influenced the book and has lived in Rome for the past 20 years.
“I’m always thinking about things like identity and family and shifting concepts of home,” she says. “And yes, I’ve moved around quite a bit, lived in three countries, but also I’ve come from a multicultural family where few of us have had quite the same upbringing or even look alike. So all of these things together have always had me thinking about family, identity, home. But I didn’t set out to write a book about these things.
“She made a legendary rum cake or plum pudding, and that’s what a lot of people call black cake in the Caribbean,” Wilkerson says. “A younger member of my family asked for the recipe several years ago and I thought, ‘Well, I’m surprised that he would care, that he would think of it.’ And that started me thinking about the ways in which we inherit family identity through food. And it also had me thinking about the power of stories to shape our identities.
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