A Tall History of Sugar

A Tall History of Sugar is a novel by the Jamaican writer Curdella Forbes, published in 2019. It begins in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica became independent, and it ends in the era the author calls the fall of empire.

Moshe Fisher is the man at the centre of it, described as having been born without skin, which is to say that his appearance leaves people unable to say what race he belongs to. Arrienne Christie is his quixotic soul mate, and she takes it upon herself to protect him from the social and emotional consequences of the way he looks.

Their story is a love story, and the history of the island and of the colonial plantation system is layered behind it without ever taking it over. The two of them spend their lives working out a way of loving each other that belongs to them rather than the one they were expected to adopt.

The legacies of that system go on shaping the lives of the people around them, and the novel follows the pair of them through the whole of the changes that follow independence.