The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Popisho

A Novel

by Leone Ross

Narrator Leone Ross

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 13 hours 4 minutes

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bookseller recommendation

“Playful and full-flavored, Popisho is a story of strange magic and communal intimacy. The kelp-crossing scene, which asks us to trust a shifting world, is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature I have ever read. "I told you," a young guide urges, while teaching our hero to walk on water, "I not following any path. I following what is here in the moment, ready to take me."”
— Alyson • WORD Bookstores

Bookseller recommendation

“I loved this book. Leone Ross does an amazing job narrating this wonderful, magical tale. Uproarious and tender in turns. I felt this one in my heart and in my sides when I laughed out loud.”
— Lisa • The Booksmith

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

An uproarious, sensual novel, Leone Ross's Popisho conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits.

Everyone in Popisho was born...with a little something...The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing that felt so inexpressibly your own.

Somewhere far away—or maybe right nearby—lies an archipelago called Popisho. A place of stunning beauty and incorrigible mischief, destiny and mystery, it is also a place in need of change.

Xavier Redchoose is the macaenus of his generation, anointed by the gods to make each resident one perfect meal when the time is right. Anise, his long lost love, is on a march toward reckoning with her healing powers. The governor’s daughter, Sonteine, is getting married, her father demanding a feast out of turn. And graffiti messages from an unknown source are asking hard questions. A storm is brewing. Before it comes, before the end of the day, this wildly imaginative narrative will take us across the islands, their history, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.

Popisho is a masterful delight: a playful love story, a portrait of community, a boldly sensual meditation on desire and addiction, and a critique of the legacies of corruption and colonialism. Inspired by the author's Jamaican homeland, inflected with rhythms and textures of an amalgam of languages, it is a dazzling, major work of fiction, in conversation with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Arundhati Roy.

Fiction Fiction - Literary

Leone Ross is a fiction writer, an editor, and an academic. She was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her first novel, All the Blood Is Red, was long-listed for the Orange Prize, and her second novel, Orange Laughter, was named by Wasafiri magazine as one of the most influential British novels of the last twenty-five years. Her work has also been short-listed for the V. S. Pritchett Prize and the Edge Hill Prize. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Roehampton University in London, where she is the anthology editor for their micropublishing house, Fincham Press. She is a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.