Kei Miller's round up of new 2021 books

Amanda Smyth’s Fortune is seriously her best novel yet. It takes you back in time and lives and breathes that history. So I knew that Trinidad’s past fortune was in cocoa and I know that its present fortune has been in oil, but I never thought about that moment of transition – when one thing is failing and the other is about to rise, a country caught between brutal agriculture and brutal industry – and to bring together this wonderful cast of characters at that crossroads just makes for a great story.