Need a literary justification to visit the Caribbean this spring? Consider the NGC Bocas Lit Festival, taking place in downtown Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago. Billed as the region's premier literature festival, the Lit Fest is devoted to developing and promoting Caribbean authors by hosting five lively days of author panels, workshops, film screenings, and performances. Held at the National Library and Old Fire Station, the festival will run from April 25-29 and is free to the public. 

In addition, NGC organizers will be announcing the 2018 prizes for Caribbean literature on April 28. Launched in 2011, these annual awards recognize the previous year's most notable additions to the Caribbean canon. Last year's winners included Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press), Augustown by Kei Miller (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) took home the top prize for fiction, and Virtual Glimpses into the Past/A Walk Back in Time: Snapshots of the History of Trinidad and Tobago by Angelo Bissessarsingh (Queen Bishop Publishing) won for best non-fiction work.

The overall winner receives an award of $10,000, while category winners each receive a cash prize of $3,000. Eligible submissions must have been first published in English in 2017 and written by a single living author who either holds Caribbean citizenship or was born in the Caribbean. (Though Francophone authors hailing from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique aren't necessarily eligible unless they write in English, their work can be considered for the Prix littéraire des Cara?bes et du Tout-Monde and the other prestigious French awards like the Prix Goncourt.)                                                                                                                                        
The NGC Lit Fest goals are to both celebrate the Caribbean's literary achievements while also maintaining the region's literacy rates, which hover around 97 to 99 percent of the overall population. Haiti remains the exception, where the literacy rate is near 60 percent, despite a rich two-hundred-year history of producing talented writers like Toussaint Louverture, Jean Price-Mars, Dany Laferriere, Jacques Roumain, and Marie-Celie Agnant.                                            

Need another reason to book a flight? Check out this interview  with Trinidad and Tobago native Tracey Baptiste, author of The Jumbies YA series. She spoke with my daughter, Abgail, in late January about Caribbean folklore and how it inspires her books. 

Lost books, medieval manuscripts, and secret archives are favorite topics for novelists, and we bibliophiles can't seem to get enough of them. I've read three varieties of bibliofiction recently, all entertaining, and each quite different from the others.  

First up: Lost Books. I heard about a new novel called The Infinite Future from an essay the author, Tim Wirkus, recently wrote titled "Our Obsession with Lost Books and How They Often Disappoint." In it, he gives a perfect summary of his novel: "Wondering what it would be like to track down and actually find a legendary manuscript, I started work on a story featuring a reclusive science fiction writer named Edward Salgado-MacKenzie, and three enthusiastic/ obsessive fans of his work who stumble upon his long-lost proposal for a never-published novel called The Infinite Future. The three devotees track rumors of the writer from São Paulo to Orange County to Eastern Idaho, recounting as they do tales from their own lives and summaries of their favorite Salgado-MacKenzie short stories." Now, sci-fi may not be your thing; it isn't mine, either. But the novel is stunningly inventive and great fun to read. Comparisons have been made to Ursula Le Guin and Roberto Bolaño, to which I would add Italo Calvino, particularly his If on a winter's night a traveler.   

Second: Medieval Manuscripts. The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer was published last year, and a paperback edition was just released. It was on my 'TBR' pile for a few months before I got to it, and once I did, I could hardly put it down. It begins in present day New York City where thirty-something neurosurgeon Beatrice Trovato is called to Siena, Italy, to inherit her art historian brother's cottage. While there, she continues his research on the Tuscan town's medieval history. She finds fourteenth-century fresco painter Gabriele Accorsi particularly intriguing, especially when she notices a familiar face in one of his works. Before long, Beatrice finds herself transported to Siena in the year 1347, where she is vastly underdressed, but she has a good grasp of Italian and a talent for calligraphy, which lands her in a scriptorium after a kind nun takes her in. Of course, Beatrice will cross paths with Accorsi, and romance will ensue. But there are still mysteries to unearth--the Medici family plays a role--and the author does a tremendous job in plotting and weaving. The result is an enormously satisfying novel. I missed the characters as soon as I turned the final page.   

Third: Secret Archives (plus a Lost Book). You could say The Bookworm by Mitch Silver is ripped from the headlines, or is it buried under a Cold War blanket? Largely set in Russia, the story is fueled by a worthy premise: Hitler positioned his army (and lost the war) based on poetic prophecies inscribed in his Bible. A set of long-forgotten audio tapes stored at the Russian State Military Archives and narrated by British actor Noel Coward pulls Russian scholar Lara Klimt, aka "the bookworm," into the fray. As she sets out to uncover Coward's plot, she discovers that current-day politicos are a little too intensely interested in her research. Turns out there's collusion! And a buffoon of an American president, too. Lara is a strong central character, but the rest of this political 'thriller' comes off as a bit boilerplate.     

Images via Penguin Random House; Simon & Schuster; and Pegasus Books