A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year

On a Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, a young girl copes with the heavy cost of migration.

When her mother emigrates to England to find work, Wheeler and her older sisters are left to live with their aunts and cousins. She spends most days with her cousin Donelle, knocking about their island community. They know they must address their elders properly and change their shoes after church. And during the long, quiet weeks of Lent, when the absent sound of the radio seems to follow them down the road, they look forward to kite season. But Donelle is just a child, too, and though her sisters look after her with varying levels of patience, Wheeler couldn’t feel more alone. Everyone tells her that soon her mother will send for her, but how much longer will it be? And as she does her best to navigate the tensions between her aunts, why does it feel like there’s no one looking out for her at all?

A story of sisterhood, secrets, and the sacrifices of love, The Pages of the Sea is a tenderly lyrical portrait of innocence and an intensely moving evocation of what it’s like to be a child left behind.

Anne Hawk's profile page

Anne Hawk grew up in the Caribbean, the UK and Canada. She has worked as a journalist, a paralegal and was for many years a secondary school teacher. She is married and lives in London. The Pages of the Sea is her first novel.

Praise for The Pages of the Sea

"Hawk’s coming-of-age story follows a young girl who’s left with her sisters on an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1960s under the care of their aunts and cousins, after their mother sails to England in search of work as part of the so-called Windrush generation."

—Globe and Mail, The Globe 100

"[A] finely observed debut."

—Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail

"This fresh perspective on the Windrush generation uses dialect to convey [a] young child’s thoughts with vivid immediacy."

—Justine Jordan, Guardian Best Fiction of 2024

"The writing is confident and precise; evocative of the beauty of the Caribbean and full of sparkling observation."

—The Guardian

"A moving portrayal of a young girl’s efforts to grow out of a state of melancholy and confusion and acquire self-confidence and assertiveness, despite her young age."

—Ottawa Review of Books

"Hawk's prose is beautiful, a lyrical and loving portrayal of an island and its people . . . A unique, scrappy, tender bildungsroman."

—Kirkus Reviews

“The Pages of the Sea a beautifully written and intimately imagined debut novel coming out of the Caribbean. Anne Hawk weaves a story rarely told, that of those left behind in the wake of migration to the ‘motherland’. Intensely moving and lyrical, here is a story of our times, another piece of the mosaic of our fractured and remade Caribbean lives.”

—Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch

"A stunning debut. It's great to see a new author championing in fiction the unheard voice of a child left behind in the Caribbean migration story of the 1960s. Beautifully told, The Pages of the Sea will resonate for many thousands."

—Yvonne Bailey-Smith, author of The Day I Fell Off My Island

"An evocative and at times heartbreaking work of Caribbean fiction filled with the colours and vibrancy of the islands and invested with a deeply personal humanity. In The Pages of the Sea, Anne Hawk gives fresh form to the Windrush era and voice to its neglected narratives."

—Anthony Joseph, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry

“What can I say except I think this is a great novel? The story breaks your heart and, at the very same time, the writing heals it. Anne Hawk’s vision is miraculously, tenderly lucid. Here is the other side of emigration—the story of one of those left behind representing the stories of so many. I can’t think of a better depiction of the confusions and insights of girlhood.”

—Toby Litt, author of Patience