One of Britain’s most innovative and adventurous publishers Peepal Tree Press based in Leeds, has announced its purchase of the right to re-publish Jamaican-Nigerian author Lindsay Barrett’s ground-breaking novel, Song for Mumu, which was first published in 1967.

According to the company’s managers the title was always on the list of novels it wanted to republish, and they are delighted to have at last managed to contact the author in Nigeria to agree to a new edition. Peepal Tree’s managing editor, Jeremy Poynting says that he, “has long admired Song for Mumu as a work of intense poetic imagination which finds new ways of exploring fundamental aspects of Caribbean reality: its histories of pain and suffering, the breach from Africa, the tensions between city and country and ways of subverting the dominance of the plantation and Eurocentric culture.

In the Caribbean Modern Classics series, it joins the work of Wilson Harris and Denis Williams in breaking out from what Harris called the ‘novel of manners’ a dominant trend of conventional realism in the Caribbean novel” Peepal Tree Press is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary since its founding in 1985. Since that time, it has published almost 500 titles. Its focus is on what George Lamming called the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world, though it is also concerned with Black British writing which draws on different heritages. Its output is roughly balanced between fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including creative genres such as memoirs and academic titles in the humanities focused on publishing the work of new writers and sustaining subsequent writing careers but also on recuperating important books from the past. In 2009, Peepal Tree launched its Caribbean Modern Classics series, now with over fifty titles.

Several of its authors have won major international awards.