Black Cake

Black Cake (2022) is a family saga that chronicles more than half a century of one family’s journey, including its thwarted dreams, star-crossed loves, and dark secrets. Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel, it centers on the story of Eleanor Bennett, a 70-something first-generation Caribbean immigrant living in Southern California. Her death opens the historical fiction novel. Her two grown children, Benny and Byron, are to listen to a recording she made shortly before her death that reveals how little the two know about their mother.

The novel uses as its organizing motif the black cake, a traditional Caribbean dessert, with its wide variety of sweet ingredients, all of which blend to make a sublime confection. In Eleanor Bennett’s tumultuous life, the novel explores the nature of identity itself, the way in which cultures combine within families, and how generation to generation a family shapes its own history. In the grand tradition of storytelling that recalls the landmark works of realism of the 19th century, the novel is structured, nevertheless, in the distinctly postmodern tradition of nonlinear narratives with chapters that jump across time and move between multiple points of view.