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Shop nowFingerprints of Previous Owners
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Learn moreThis 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.
Rebecca Entel is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Cornell College, where she teaches African American and Caribbean literature and directs the Center for the Literary Arts. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Her short stories have been published in Guernica, Joyland magazine, Madison Review, and elsewhere, and several have been shortlisted for awards from Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and the Manchester Fiction Prize.
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 began her audiobook narration in 1994. She's read over 130 titles covering many different genres and has won multiple Earphones awards. Her many audiobook credits include Augusten Burroughs's Sellevision, Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying, and Lalita Tademy's Cane River. Her film and television credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors' unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a B.A. 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 audiobook narrator, and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits. Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP. He works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.
Reviews
“Rebecca Entel writes with spellbinding intelligence and a deep knowledge of the human heart. Her writing is true and exquisite, serious and fun.”
“How drastically different perspectives can simultaneously coexist is the foundation for Entel’s debut novel.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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