Stone Haven — Evan Jones

A classic in West Indian literature, Stone Haven covers the years up to and including Jamaican independence, as reflected by the life of a family. In 1920 Jamaica, Grace Newton, a young Quaker missionary, defies her family's color prejudice and marries a prospering local planter. Stone Haven is the house Grace's husband builds for her, and here for the next forty years she lives and works-as mother of a school, a community, and a demanding family; as wife of one of Jamaica's most ambitious and successful men. The power of the novel lies in the emotional life of the family-in their struggle for money, power, and sex, and the hope that these things can be obtained and enjoyed within a moral framework.