We were delighted to hear that Monique Roffey had won the Costa Book Award 2020 for her novel The Mermaid of Black Conch. Published by Peepal Tree press, this is Roffey’s sixth novel and a thing of pure beauty: a deeply moving love story between local fisherman, David Baptiste, and the mermaid he first lays eyes on one morning off Murder Bay: 

‘David was strumming his guitar and singing to himself when she first raised her barnacled, seaweed-clotted head from the flat, grey sea, its stark hues of turquoise not yet stirred.’ 

This barnacled creature, we later discover, is Aycayia, an indigenous woman turned into a mermaid many years before by her own women in a jealous attempt to stop her beguiling their men. 

Later, when Aycayia is yanked from the sea by American tourists as part of a macho fishing competition and strung up on the harbour for all to see – ‘her head hanging downwards, her deadly hair trailing, her arms lashed with rope behind her back, her breasts naked’ – we do not expect a happy ending . But Roffey has written a subversive tale. In Baptiste’s care, Aycayia is rescued, and nurtured. She sheds her fish scales and her tale, she learns to speak, and she once more, exercising, and enjoying, her considerable powers over the fisherman. 

But as local suspicions grow around the new ‘woman’ seen near Baptiste’s home, and Aycayia experiences strange echoes of the ancient curse – in one epic scene, fish begin to rain down from the sky, an act Aycayia feels sure is connected to the curse – she asks David to take her back to the sea. 

With a clever structure, a vivid cast of characters – from Porthos, the corrupt policeman, to Miss Rain, the complicated landowner and Miss Priscilla, the brilliantly nasty neighbour – and the kind of exquisitely rich language that makes you yearn to see the landscapes and people Roffey describes, The Mermaid of Black Conch is one of those novels that will capture your heart and make you want to return to it again, and again.