New Day

Kingston, Jamaica; London: Sangster's Book Stores with Heinemann, 1970. Second impression by Sangster's Book Stores with Heinemann in 1970; first published by Knopf in 1949. Hardcover, octavo, slate cloth boards with gilt lettering in pictorial dust jacket, 344 pp. Very good, front free endpaper owner-inscribed, up to 50 pages in text block under-lined with annotations from literary critic and translator Roberto Marquez; very good dust jacket, spine ends chipped, covers rubbed, edges and corners worn and rubbed, edges creased/Very good dust jacket, chipped spine ends with. Cover design by Joint Graphics. Considered to be an early work in introducing patois to a new, younger generation by way of a manuscript written entirely in Creole, hardly facilitating its publication.
In his introductory note to this 1970 printing, V.S. Reid recounts a brief history of Jamaica leading up to the opening of his first novel. It's October 1865, the beginning of the Morant Bay Rebellion in St. Thomas Parish, the subject of commemoration in his work, In the wake of a 3 year drought(1863-1865), conditions have severely worsened for the disenfranchised. They saw the wealthiest of land owners crying to the appointed Crown for aid in what they claimed was a debilitated standard of living. Since emancipation had created a scarcity of labor due to workers preference to autonomy in subsistence farming, there grew a rebellion to enrich livelihoods, universal suffrage and government representation. The novel spans the eight decades separating the Morant Bay Rebellion and present day Jamaica through the lives of the fictional Campbell family.
In Reid's own words, this novel is an attempt to "transfer to paper some of the beauty, kindliness, and humour of my people, weaving characters into the wider framework of these eighty years and creating a tale that will offer as true an impression as fiction can of the way by which Jamaica and its people came to today.