The Flying Prophet and the Broken Body: A Review of Kei Miller’s Augustown

Some novels knock gently before entering your life. Others simply burst through the window, mid-sentence, and demand your attention. Kei Miller’s Augustown did the latter. I first read it on a Sunday afternoon that felt too still, too heavy, and somewhere along the line, the air changed. Not just because Miller writes with an urgency that refuses to idle, but because he has that rare gift: the ability to tell a story that feels mythic and microscopic at once. The book was a gift given to me by a Rastafarian friend during the Achimota school saga a few years ago – as if to say, read this, and understand.

Kei Miller crafts a fiercely lyrical and politically charged novel which refuses to let Jamaica’s colonial ghosts rest easy. Set in 1982 in the real-life district of August Town, a working-class neighborhood in Kingston, Jamaica, the novel loops and dips through time, history, and the spectral. Its anchor is Ma Taffy, an elderly, blind woman with sharp instincts and a memory for things most people would rather forget. When her grand-nephew Kaia comes home from school freshly humiliated by his teacher, Ma Taffy senses the air is turning. She’s seen this before. Something terrible is on the horizon.

This act of cutting Kaia’s dreadlocks becomes the novel’s central moment of rupture. But to understand what’s coming, Miller takes us back – way back. To 1921, to the story of Alexander Bedward, a real Jamaican preacher and folk prophet who claimed he would ascend to heaven in front of a crowd of believers. Spoiler: he did not. Or maybe he did. Depends on who’s telling the story. And that, in many ways, is the engine of Augustown: the conflict between what is remembered, what is written down, and what people know in their bones to be true.

What Miller accomplishes here is quietly astonishing. He uses Bedward’s story not as historical trivia, but as a kind of parable: about belief, Black dignity, and what happens when a people are told again and again that their bodies do not rise. That they do not belong in the sky. That miracles are for other people. In a moment that startled me on first read and still moves me now, Miller writes: “This isn’t magic realism. This is what happened.” He draws a sharp, deliberate line between the Western literary genre of the magical and the lived, spiritual truths of Afro-Caribbean people. It’s not a clever twist. It’s a rebuke.

And yet Augustown is full of magic—real magic. Not wands and witches, but a narrative alchemy that folds time and space with grace. The structure is circular, recursive. There are flashbacks nested within digressions, voices that interrupt each other, memories that hijack the present. And Miller makes it all flow. You never feel lost. You feel like you’re being guided by someone who knows these streets, these spirits, these silences.

As the narrator tells us early on, “Nothing really begins when it begins, and nothing’s over when it’s over.” This looping of time foregrounds the idea that history is never past, that the colonial wound is not healed, but festering beneath the surface of Jamaican society.

I’ve always been wary of books that use history like wallpaper—decorative, distant. But Augustown is different. Its history isn’t dead. It leaks. It bleeds into the present. When Ma Taffy warns of something coming, it’s because she’s lived through it before. The violence of colonialism, of humiliation, of stolen futures—it keeps circling back. The personal and political are not parallel here; they are superimposed.

And yet, the novel never becomes a lecture. Miller’s prose is warm, sly, at times biting. He has a storyteller’s instincts: when to slow down, when to shift perspective, when to let a sentence roll long and musical. His narrator breaks the fourth wall more than once, addressing the reader directly with a kind of weary intimacy. “Listen,” the voice says. “You think you know how this story goes. But you don’t.”

What is most compelling about Augustown is how it holds together disparate threads – history, myth, race, class, and education – without ever seeming didactic. The cutting of Kaia’s hair is not an isolated incident; it is tied to a deeper conflict between state-sanctioned respectability and grassroots spiritual resistance. The teacher, Miss Isabella, represents the rigid, colonial model of education, one that views dreadlocks and Rastafarian identity as threats to order and discipline. In contrast, Ma Taffy and the Rastafarian community represent an alternative epistemology, one rooted in oral tradition, spiritual revelation, and communal memory. Miller makes it clear that these competing visions of knowledge are not merely aesthetic differences – they are battles over the soul of the nation.

There’s also something deeply tender about how Miller writes his characters. Kaia is just a boy, trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t care about his sense-making. His mother, Gina, is exhausted, brilliant, underpaid—like so many Black women whose survival keeps the world turning but rarely earns its respect. And Ma Taffy? She is the novel’s heart. Her blindness sharpens her insight. She listens, remembers, fears. Through her, Miller explores what it means to be a witness in a world that prefers forgetting.

One of the novel’s most poignant achievements is its treatment of madness – not as a medical condition, but as a political category. Bedward, whose ecstatic visions threaten colonial authority, is declared insane and confined. Years later, a similar fate awaits another character, Mr. Saint-Josephs, a young teacher who dares to see the children he teaches not as future laborers or criminals, but as whole people with capacity for beauty and creativity. He, too, is branded mad. In Miller’s hands, madness becomes a metaphor for black prophetic vision that the state cannot contain or understand. The novel asks, chillingly, what kind of society criminalizes its visionaries?

Although Augustown is steeped in Jamaican culture and history, its concerns are broadly diasporic and deeply relevant to other postcolonial contexts. Miller interrogates the legacies of British colonialism, particularly its impact on education, religion, and language. The novel asks: What does it mean to be free in a nation where colonial logic still shapes everyday life? What forms of expression – spiritual, aesthetic, political – are still policed or punished in the name of order?

Even as Miller critiques the failures of Jamaican society, he also writes with profound affection for its people – the hustlers, the market women, the schoolchildren, the dreamers. Augustown is not a utopia, but it is a place of survival, resistance, and sometimes even magic. In the novel’s climactic scene – one best left unspoiled for new readers – Miller delivers a moment of transcendence that is both cathartic and ambiguous. Is it a miracle? A hallucination? A metaphor? The novel refuses to say definitively, and that refusal is part of its power. Augustown insists that black spiritual experience, particularly in its Caribbean manifestations, cannot be fully domesticated by reason or reduced to pathology.

I was particularly moved by how the novel holds space for grief—both public and private. It mourns not just people, but possibilities. What would Jamaica have been if Bedward had flown? If the colonial record hadn’t silenced him? If dignity hadn’t been mistaken for madness? The sadness in Augustown is not just that the past is violent—it’s that the future we were promised never arrived.

This novel belongs to a lineage of Caribbean writing that blends the political and the poetic – Wilson Harris, Earl Lovelace, Jean Rhys, and more recently, Marlon James. Like these writers, Miller is interested in how language itself carries the wounds and resistances of colonialism. His use of patois is not ornamental but essential; it affirms a mode of storytelling that resists the imperial demand for “proper” English. The novel is a linguistic act of decolonization.

If Augustown has a weakness, it may lie in its occasional over-explanation. The narrator, in moments of philosophical reflection, sometimes tells the reader what the text already shows. This can feel redundant, especially in a novel that otherwise trusts its readers to draw connections. Yet these moments are rare and do little to detract from the novel’s overall impact.

Augustown is a remarkable work of fiction – layered, prophetic, and unsettling. It tells the story of one afternoon in a dusty Jamaican town, but in doing so, it opens out into a history of empire, a theology of resistance, and a vision of liberation that is both rooted and soaring. Like Bedward himself, Miller’s novel attempts to fly – not away from history, but into its heart, carrying with it the hopes of those who still believe in miracles.

Despite the profound sadness of the novel, there is joy here. There is music, laughter, rice and peas, kites in the sky. Miller does not write despair porn. He writes communities. He writes resilience without performance. And when something miraculous does happen (and oh, it does), he lets it sit quietly in the reader’s chest, glowing.

Some books ask to be read. This one asks to be remembered.