Fingerprints of Previous Owners Lib/E

This is a soulful and timely novel exploring family histories and community divides, in the vein of Nicole Dennis-Benn's Here Comes the Sun and Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. At a Caribbean resort built atop a former slave plantation, Myrna works as a maid by day; by night she trespasses on the resort's overgrown inland property, secretly excavating the plantation ruins that her island community refuses to acknowledge. Rapt by the crumbling walls of the once slave owner's estate, she explores the unspoken history of the plantation--a site where her ancestors once worked the land, but which the resort now uses as a lookout point for tourists. When Myrna discovers a book detailing the experiences of slaves, who still share a last name with the majority of the islanders, her investigation becomes deeply personal, extending to her neighbors and friends, and explaining her mother's self-imposed silence and brother's disappearance. A new generation begins to speak about the past just as racial tensions erupt between the resort and the local island community when an African American tourist at the resort is brutally attacked. Suffused with the sun-drenched beauty of the Caribbean, Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a powerful novel of hope and recovery in the wake of devastating trauma. In her soulful and timely debut, Entel explores what it means to colonize and be colonized, to trespass and be trespassed upon, to be wounded and to heal.

About the Author :
Rebecca Entel teaches African American and Caribbean literature at Cornell College. Her short stories have been published in Guernica and Madison Review. Cherise Boothe, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, has worked extensively in theater, film, television, and narration. She has appeared in numerous regional plays, as well as in television shows such as The Good Wife, Law & Order: SVU, and Gossip Girl. She holds an MFA in acting from New York University. She was a finalist in 2015 for the prestigious Audie Award for best multivoiced narration. Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has won several Audie and Earphones Awards. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England. Ron Butler is a Los Angeles-based actor, Earphones Award-winning narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits.

Review :
"Entel's delicately crafted debut explores the relationships between the resort, an economic center that distorts the island's history for its own purposes, and the local people and the ways the past infuses the present." -- "Booklist" "How drastically different perspectives can simultaneously coexist is the foundation for Entel's debut novel." -- "Cedar Rapids Gazette (Iowa)" "One of the novel's most effective components is the weaving of multigenerational and intercontinental relationships among the islanders and Americans who have a history with Furnace Island, where the story takes place...[and the] passages are beautifully descriptive." -- "Library Journal" "Rebecca Entel writes with spellbinding intelligence and a deep knowledge of the human heart. Her writing is true and exquisite, serious and fun." -- "Lorrie Moore, New York Times bestselling author" "This is the first novel by Entel...and it is a magnificent one. Her prose is lyrical, luminous, and each detail has been planted as precisely as a foundation stone...Both Myrna and Entel seek to unearth a long-buried history; both of them seek to give voice to those who have been silenced. Here's hoping that Entel follows her first novel with many more." -- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"