Through his teaching, Bedward’s followers come to the realisation that slavery has continued by another name.

The unnamed, deceased narrator looks down from the heavens on her hometown without pity, marshalling the stories, Bedward’s in particular. Back in the 1920s, we have the preacher Bedward. The modern-day characters include the ruling rude-boy gangster “Soft-Paw”, a self-proclaimed defender of this ghetto community the prostitute suffering from an unknown condition who sees out her remaining time “taking comfort and amusement in the misfortune of others” the spliff-smoking granny, Ma Taffy, who was blinded by rats and now has her senses tuned to coming catastrophes (which Jamaicans call “autoclaps”) and Gina, the bright school “gyal” who must fend off the unwelcome attentions of older men awaiting her ripening. Into the eponymous village Augustown, the place where freed slaves fled on emancipation morning in 1838, Miller casts compelling archetypes, in a narrative spanning from 1920 to 1982. An admired poet, Miller, like his compatriot the Man Booker prize-winning Marlon James, has mined a rich seam of Jamaican history. The story of Bedward at the centre of Augustown, a partially fictionalised version of August Town, is given a much more richly nuanced and empathetic telling in Kei Miller’s vivid modern fable. The headline in the national paper, the Gleaner, mocked: “Bedward Stick to the Earth”. At the appointed hour they leapt but instead of soaring towards the firmament they came crashing down.

The followers were told to climb nearby trees and to wait for the signal to jump. Possessions were no longer needed because on that day Bedward had prophesied they’d “fly away home” and ascend to heaven. O n 31 December 1920 thousands of Jamaicans who, on the instructions of the messianic preacher Alexander Bedward, had given away all of their worldly goods, assembled at August Town.

Augustown by kei miller