This book had its genesis in a 2017 internet story about the impact of extreme heat on those who lived or worked outdoors in India – mainly construction workers, farmers, or people without adequate shelter. I started thinking about what it would mean for a tropical country, like my own, if it became too dangerous to be outside in the day, for at least some portion of the year. What occupations would be affected? Would we still be able to grow food? What would happen if roads melted? Suppose it got so hot that we all had to work at night and sleep in the day? And suppose there was a girl, a teenager, who simply couldn’t sleep during the day?

In the two years since I began writing Daylight Come, I’ve seen much that I imagined in a hot new world actually occurring – fires, floods, droughts, crop failures, heat waves, desperate people on the move. The climate crisis is here and now, but worse is ahead, if we do not change course.

Given that I’ve spent almost three decades as an environmental activist, young people often ask me, what is to be done? We have to tell stories, I reply. Engage people’s imaginations. Their emotions, their connections to home and family. To place. My hope for Daylight Come is that it will do just that.

The place names in the Caribbean came from Taino words and I used the old names for continents and oceans. We humans so often rename the places we encounter, in part to hide our crimes against each other and against nature, so I wanted the climate catastrophe to trigger just such a reinvention. A discerning reader will see the Jamaican bones which underlie the island of Bajacu in 2084, but I’ve not been constrained by actual geography and Daylight Come is a work of fiction.

Thanks to my first and always generous readers – Freddy, Celia, Esther, Jonathan, Polly and Yasmin. I’m grateful for the BURT Prize for Caribbean Literature, which awarded a third place prize to an earlier version of Daylight Come. Thanks to all at Peepal Tree Press – Jeremy Poynting and Hannah Bannister, and especially to Jacob Ross, whose keen editorial attention made Daylight Come a much better book.

Here’s hoping this book remains forever in the category of speculative fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer and environmental activist. She has written two novels, Dog-Heart (March 2010) and Huracan (July 2012), published by PeepalTree Press. Both novels met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records.