Puerto Rico: A National History
Post

Women Surrounded by Water: A Memoir

Longlisted, 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography Growing up in Puerto Rico, Patricia Coral was surrounded by women who fought for their needs amid the demands of domesticity and who were dismissed and judged when they rejected any predetermined paths on an island that itself has never been free. At age twenty-five, she married her first love, a green-eyed musician whose internal storms drove Coral to slowly realize that the marriage must end. Faced with disillusionment-with her husband, with the patriarchal expectations that surrounded her like the Caribbean Sea, and with the limited options available to her-she leaves, only for Hurricane Maria to wrench her heart homeward. Coral evokes the beauty, love, and language of her family and of Puerto Rico as well as the pain of yearning for more. Tastes, colors, and the dreamlike lushness of childhood memories infuse this mournful and propulsive memoir of personal and natural disasters-and the self-discovery made possible only when we choose what to leave behind.

Publisher: The Ohio State University Press

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • The American buffalo—our nation’s official mammal—is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales.

  • Amaris Castillo takes readers inside Orlando Latin Market, a bodega owned and operated by her parents in St. Petersburg, Florida.

  • From the risky backstreets of sixteenth-century Paris to the unpredictable suburbs of mid-twentieth century New York, the stakes couldn’t be higher when, 400 years apart, Milly, Lysbette, and Charlotte each face a reality where the spread of ideas are feared and every effort is made to suppress them.

  • The devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud daily chronicle of Bridget’s permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement.