Passiontide by Monique Roffey review – flawed but well-told tale of a feminist uprising

The murder of a Japanese tourist on a fictional Caribbean island sparks a rebellion among the local women in an urgent novel mirroring a real-life case

The past 10 years have seen many feminist uprisings, from the #MeToo movement to the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran in 2022. Each event has forced the world to reckon with patriarchal forces that leave women disadvantaged, assaulted and murdered. Yet femicide rates still rise. Thousands of Kenyan women took to the streets in January in a demonstration against gender-based violence, while recent data suggested that Black women in London face a higher rate of femicide than any other demographic in the city. The question of how and when things will change is at the core of this novel by Monique Roffey, the 2021 winner of the Costa book of the year for The Mermaid of Black Conch.

Set on a small fictional Caribbean island called St Colibri, which is still grappling with the legacy of colonialism, Passiontide addresses this epidemic of savagery. It starts with the brutal murder of Sora Tanaka, a Japanese tourist who came to the island regularly to play steel pan during the annual carnival celebrations. “I shout but no sound comes. My throat was hurt, choked,” her ghost says. Her body is found on the savannah under a cannonball tree. It’s Ash Wednesday, the morning after carnival, and she is still wearing her bright masquerade outfit. (The story resembles the real-life murder of Asami Nagakiya, killed in Trinidad in 2016.)