Since her first, prize-winning collection of stories, *At the Bottom of the River*, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. *The New York Times* hailed her "prophetic power" and the *Los Angeles Times Book Review* said: "No one else seems to be writing quite this way right now." With *Annie John*, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme that lies at the heart of all her fierce, incantatory novels: the ambivalent and essential bonds created by a mother's love. In this novel, written in Kincaid's lucid, elemental style, Annie John's ambivalence is universally familiar and wrenchingly real.