Fingerprints of Previous Owners: A Novel

This 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.