The Humming-Bird Tree

“[The Humming-Bird Tree] is a gently heartbreaking tale about racial boundaries, and a haunting evocation of postwar Trinidad in all its beauty and ugliness, emerging into a new era with the prospect of independence on the horizon.” —Guardian

SET IN COLONIAL TRINIDAD IN THE 1940S, The Humming-Bird Tree explores the friendship between an affluent white boy named Alan and two Indo-Trinidadian siblings, Kaiser and Jaillin, who are employed by Alan’s family.

As a young child, Alan was too young to understand why his parents preferred him to play with the other white kids on the estate. But gradually, he learned that if he was planning to meet up with Kaiser and Jaillin, he had to pretend he was getting together with different people; he had to pretend he didn’t enjoy spending time with his friends; he had to pretend he didn’t mind when he wasn’t allowed to invite them to his party. Sometimes, horribly, the pretending became real, and Alan found himself in betrayal of the friendships that meant so much to him. The novel powerfully highlights the cultural, racial, and socioeconomic divides of the era, and reflects on the divisions that remain today.

The Humming-Bird Tree was first published in 1969, and won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (then the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize); in 1992 it was adapted into a BBC film shot in Trinidad. This new edition features a brand-new afterword by Nicholas Laughlin, director of Trinidad’s annual Bocas Lit Fest.

The Humming-Bird Tree is a selection of the Akashic Caribbean Classics Series, continuing our celebration of the extraordinary voices in Caribbean literature.