The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller

Beautifully imaginative and structurally inventive, Miller’s second novel (after The Same Earth) tells the story of Adamine Bustamante, an orphan raised in a leper colony in Spanish Town, Jamaica, whose gift of “warning” leads her to join the Revivalist Church. When Adamine immigrates to England in search of a better life, she is locked up in a mental asylum for preaching her doomsday views. Years later, released from the institution, she meets “Mr Writer Man,” a young author interested in telling her story. Miller’s narrative alternates between Adamine’s first-person account, told in a colourful and soul-baring patois, and sections recounted, mostly in the third person, by Mr Writer Man. The two viewpoints at times conflict in illuminating ways, but Mr Writer Man’s reflections on truth, history, and literature pale next to the plot’s more immediate concerns: spirituality, violence against women, and migration, to name a few. Miller’s talents as a storyteller come to the fore in the book’s climactic final chapters, when previously withheld plot details are revealed, tying the book together.

About the Author
Kei Miller was born in 1978 and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica.
He studied English at the University of the West Indies and moved to England to study for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2004.
His first book was a collection of short stories, Fear of Stones and other stories (2006), shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize (Caribbean and Canada Region, Best First Book), and this was followed by two poetry collections – Kingdom of Empty Bellies (2006) and There Is An Anger That Moves (2007). His first novel, The Same Earth, was published in 2008.
His most recent books are the novel, The Last Warner Woman (2010), a further poetry collection, A Light Song of Light (2010), shortlisted for the 2010 John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial Prize and the collection The Cartographer Tries to Map A Way to Zion.
In this new collection, Miller dramatises what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. The cartographer used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it (‘I never get involved / with the muddy affairs of land’), is gradually compelled to recognise – even to envy – a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that on this island of roads that ‘constrict like throats’, every place name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.
Kei Miller has been a visiting writer at York University, Canada; the Department of Library Services in the British Virgin Islands; Vera Rubin Fellow at Yaddo; and an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa.
He is also the editor of New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (2007), and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. He lives in London.

Other Books by the Author
The Light Song
Augustown
The Things I Withheld
The Fear of Stones
The Same Earth