Two Days in Mayaro

Released: Sept 15, 2026
Goose Lane Editions
9781773104720

A new collection of stories of the Jamaican diaspora by acclaimed poet and storyteller Pamela Mordecai. Deftly weaving darkness into light and the past into the present, Mordecai creates a world powered by unforgettable characters in language that sings.

Reviews for Two Days in Mayaro

Click here to read a review of Two Days in Mayaro by Kwame Eff in Quill & Quire, Sept 2026.

 Praise for Two Days in Mayaro

Pamela Mordecai carries in her every literary gesture the grounded sensibility and language of Jamaica’s deeply complex and earthbound cultures, which travel with her through her journeys of the imagination and her actual travels. A writer interested in themes of departure, arrival, settling, and unsettling, Mordecai creates stories rich with humor, deep feeling, and Jamaican folk wisdom. Each of them give account of an oft-ignored feature of the Jamaican spirit – the improvisational and transformative force of a culture that doggedly survives despite geographical and psychic journeys, enriching and redefining the idea of home. Mordecai’s fiction, classically crafted and brilliantly devoted to the universal values of stories and people, delights and moves us, sentence after memorable sentence.
~ Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town

The funniest serious book I’ve read in years. Pamela Mordecai treats the no-joke experience of living between worlds in the most insightfully hilarious ways. The alchemies she weaves between outrage and laughter, faith and give up, ‘yard’ and ‘foreign’ (not to mention man and duppy) produce an alternative universe of a different kind. Two Days in Mayaro is Mordecai at her compelling best.
~ Curdella Forbes, author of A Tall History of Sugar

Pamela Mordecai plays across the spectrum of Caribbean languages like a maestro’s fingers on a piano. From the deep Jamaican Patwa of a woman’s first Canadian winter, to the standard English of an academic recalling an extraordinary weekend, to the Spanglish of the hemispheric diaspora, and the ghostly murmur of Haitian Creole, Mordecai renders each voice with an authenticity that only a Caribbean writer of her stature could command. These are thirteen stories set in places as far afield as Mayaro village in Trinidad and the subway stations of Toronto, and they carry with them all the heirlooms that Caribbean people carry when they leave home: the folklore, the duppy sightings, the prophecies and proverbs, the obeah, all rendered with an islander’s humour. Mordecai’s great gift is to make this combination feel not like the past haunting the present, but like the fullness of Caribbean crossroads identity: comic tender, at times frightening, yet undeniably relevant.
~ Celeste Mohammed, author of Pleasantview

Who but Pamela Mordecai, with her inimitable loving irreverence, would speak of the ‘Divinity with an affinity for stones, like how he send out a likl pikni with a slingshot and a pebble to lick down a giant’? Mordecai’s stories flesh out the literary landscape of ‘this too’ is Canada. She reminds us in Two Days in Mayaro of the richness of the many englishes cast, like those pebbles around the globe, while she licks down our tired language borders.
~ Shani Mootoo, author of Starry Starry Night