"Truth was, they just didn’t know how many women were dead from, what? Greed? Craving? In the Caribbean, everybody exhausted. Like the wheel of trauma went round and round, over several centuries. Millions of First Peoples genocided, millions of Africans enslaved, mass monoculture under a plantation system, heinous mass torture, enforced Christianity, and European language, and culture, indentured Indians, and inside of this, unknowable numbers of women raped and killed. Sora Tanaka was bitten on her neck, strangled to death."

Passiontide is the latest novel from Monique Roffey after the stunning The Mermaid of Black Conch, deservedly the most heralded English language novel of 2020.

Set on the ficticious St Colibri - Black Conch features briefly here as a sister island - this is a more overtly political novel, taking its tragic inspiration from a real-life event: In February 2016, on Ash Wednesday, the body of steel pan player Asami Nagakiya was found dead under a cannonball tree in Port of Spain, Trinidad, as Roffey explans in an afterword,

Passiontide is set over the Lent period (hence the novel's name, Passiontide the Sunday 2 weeks before Easter) and opens with a very similar incident. On Ash Wednesday, as workers clear away the aftermath of Carnival, they discovered the body of a woman, eventually identified as Japanese pan player Sora Tanaka, under a cannonball tree, victim of a savage murder.

A group of local women, led by a local journalist, the leader of a sex worker's collective and an activist, come together to protest the death, and violence against women in general, in part inspired by the tactics of the Occupy protestors:

"She gazed around. Fat, thin, old, young, straight, queer, brown, black and, yes, even some white women had joined them. Sex workers, mothers, single mothers, friends. The powers that be saw them as nobodies. Freaks. This, indeed, was the best they could muster, in a city of half a million. But the Buddha, Jesus, alluh dem had started a revolution with less disciples. A handful of press had gathered too. Some were snapping pictures."

Their initially modest protest snowballs as many women across the community join in, including the Prime Minister's wife, in an increasingly intersectional campaign:

"And so, on the fourth Sunday of Lent, thousands of women, their children left behind in the crèche, marched back to the cannonball tree where the young pan player from Japan had been murdered, strangled by a stranger, left for dead. Women who were black and brown, African and Carib, Hindu and Creole, old and young, queer and straight, many from working-class backgrounds, but not all, some held large photos of dead or missing local women. Many held placards and new hashtag signs; #IMSCAREDTOO, #FEMICIDEMUSTSTOP; in these numbers, they were now impossible to ignore. Always the symbol of the cannonball tree held aloft."

The PM attempts to push-back, arguing that their feminism is a white-Western import which detracts from the true enemy:

"Feminism is not something that comes from a colonised space. It was invented by white women in America and Europe, imposed on us; both of these places colonise us. Their feminism has nothing to do with us here in St Colibri. We, as an island state, are signatories to the UN’s CEDAW Convention, which bans all discrimination against women. We take this seriously. We, your men, black men, are good men. We are from an oppressed people. Let us never forget this. And we are not your enemy. We are your brothers and friends and husbands. We share an enemy, our ex-colonisers, and this, this bobol with “femicide” and all of this – tying yourselves to railings, playing dead – nah, this is clouding the real issue we should be setting ourselves. Which is to take the issue of reparations to the highest court in the world, The Hague, and demand compensation for five hundred years of slavery. Allayou, while I understand have a point, allayou is wrong, overall. You are, in fact, missing the point. We, black men, we are oppressed; we support you. You, women of this island should support us too, and join us in this shared struggle."

but this backfires badly, not least as the main opposition to the women comes from the very forces he claims to be against, and even he eventually sees the way the political tides are flowing.

Passiontide lacks the mythical inventiveness of The Mermaid of Black Conch and the intersectional, and successful, nature of the protests can seem a little idealised, although Roffey reminds us in her afterword that the #lifeinleggings and #leaveshealone campaigns in the Carribean in 2016-17 pre-dated the global #metoo movement. But what is lacks in myth it makes up for in passion, and I hope the Women's Prize and Booker will rectify their bizarre lack of acknowledgment of Roffey's previous work.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

After the murder of a Japanese lady in Port Isabella, four women start a revolution to fight against femicide.

This book was amazing! It had the right amount of tension. The characters were unique and well developed and I loved how the four women worked together. Femicide has been a global issue for years, with seemingly little being done by governments. I love how the author touched on such a serious issue and highlighted how different aspects of the system are rigged against justice. I loved this book and can’t wait to read more from this author.

I love Monique Roffey's previous books so was very pleased to receive this one. I really enjoyed it, there's a great cast of characters, important issues, various goddesses, and a lot of humour.
Sora, a Japanese pan player, came to St Colibri, for carnival, and is murdered on the final night. For Tara, Sharleen and Gigi, this is the final straw after 500 unsolved femicides on the island, and they start a protest, which gradually gains the support of local women from all walks of life.
Monique Roffey has a lovely distinct writing style which captures the speech and spirit of the island. Highly recommended.

A powerful book that highlights the way society all over see woman. I found this book really moving, it has a sense of almost satire but the sad thing was it was far from satire. It was well written and the ending hammered the point and main themes of book home perfectly.

A lot of books usually either have a super good beginning or an amazing end. It's pretty rare for me to find one that has both but this defiantly had such a great beginning and all the way through pace that kept me wanting to keep reading like crazy, loved this authors previous work and this was fantastic ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Cartwheeling into the eternal return of the same. I couldn't help but think of Bolaño's 2666, and where he goes metaphysical, Roffey goes intersectional. Roffey's approach takes us along all the axes - gender, class, sexual, racial - and keeps pushing. Most of the time I was annoyed by her almost cartoonish presentation of intersectional politics, always insisting on different women taking part in this or that action (and we get a full set of references from ACT UP's die-ins to Occupy), naming names, stringing letters together as if reading from some NGO manual. Not that it isn't done with a lot of flair, but irony can only go so far. But then the ending that slaps. And I can't help but wonder - what can be done beyond the now familiar (and obviously ineffective) identity politics? How to not only interrupt the eternal return of the same, but to take apart the whole machine and all its cogs? The novel leaves us with this question.

Passiontide follows the St Colibri Carnival as a female steel-pan player if found dead underneath a tree. The women come together after this murder to protest femicide. Different women are followed such as Gigi who is a sex worker but also Daisy who is the First Lady of St Colibri. They need to speak out as women are not valued in St Colibri.

This was an important and intriguing read. It covers a serious topic that I feel is handled with care. The dialogue/writing in this was done well and considering the heavy topic was an easy read.

By turns exhilarating and bleak, this is an explosive story of what happens on a small Caribbean island when enough women stand up and say no: no to the patriarchy, no to misogyny, no to abuse, domestic violence and the global epidemic of femicide.

I don't want to say too much about the plot as readers deserve to encounter the story for themselves but I appreciated the way this taps into a wider global feminist concern while keeping the specifics tied to the Caribbean location. So much about the women's activism taps into the history of the island and its mix of races, ethnicities, faiths and religions. The music of the steel band is the soundtrack, and Roffey captures the cadences of speech beautifully. Importantly, the women unite across all categories: age, class, education, sexual identities, professions, health and bodily abilities. This also takes careful account of Caribbean history and the specific sensitivities spawned by centuries of colonisation, slavery and exploitation - and how that history might inflect constructions of masculinity, the family and the ever-presence of violence.

All of which makes this sound earnest - actually, it's a blast, with sharp, smart humour, and a truly stand-up-and-cheer feel about some of the scenes. The 'still not asking for it' scene had me snorting out loud! And there is at least one gorgeous, complicated love story.

But this is no fairy tale: for all the triumph of the women's rebellion, we all know change -real, deep, sustained change - is no easy, overnight thing: misogyny is deep and complex, there is too much at stake and very few people give up power knowingly and voluntarily. And Roffey's interesting afterword comments on how real life events hardened the ending.

Nevertheless, this is an all-in, passionate book, with fierce heroines and a bold, colourful trajectory - it's adult enough to keep things realistic, but it offers up a glorious vision at its heart - I loved it!