Out Of The Caribbean: House of Anansi Releases ‘Layaway Child’ Debut by Chanel Sutherland
Layaway Child is Vincentian author Chanel Sutherland’s debut short story collection, published 12th May by House of Anansi. Through linked, lyrical stories, the collection traces the lives of Caribbean mothers working abroad as housekeepers and nannies, and the daughters they leave behind, moving between lush island childhoods and the meek, alienating spaces of Canadian cities. […]
Black News 
Layaway Child is Vincentian author Chanel Sutherland’s debut short story collection, published 12th May by House of Anansi.
Through linked, lyrical stories, the collection traces the lives of Caribbean mothers working abroad as housekeepers and nannies, and the daughters they leave behind, moving between lush island childhoods and the meek, alienating spaces of Canadian cities.
A mother newly arrived in Montreal is prevented from speaking to her daughters by her own mother’s attempt to help her let go of home. A schoolgirl becomes a spectacle under the gaze of her white classmates. The title story takes its name from the way Sutherland understood, at fourteen, what it meant to be put on hold and paid off slowly over time, until you could finally be claimed or gain a sense of home.
Sometimes there can be an eerie silence between a Caribbean mother and the child she unintentionally leaves behind. Not the silence of absence exactly, but the silence of phone calls becoming less frequent, remittances arriving in place of presence, and reunions that feel more like meetings between strangers than homecomings.
Sutherland has carried that silence since she was ten years old, when she joined her mother in Montreal eight years after her mother had left St. Vincent to work as a cleaner and caregiver. That reunion, she has said, was not seamless. By then, her mother felt like someone else’s person.
Sutherland is the winner of both the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize. She also won the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for a story that now opens the collection.
Critical response to Layaway Child has already been strong, with reviewers describing it as “a welcome addition to the Canadian Caribbean canon” and praising Sutherland’s ability to hold beauty and harshness in the same space without allowing one to cancel out the other.
The story of “barrel children”, the term often used for children of Caribbean parents who migrated abroad for work while they remained with grandparents or extended family, remains one of the most emotionally defining yet underexplored narratives of diaspora life.
It sits at the heart of Caribbean migration history, yet has rarely been rendered in fiction with this level of precision and tenderness. Sutherland writes from the inside, without sentimentality or judgement, while refusing to absolve the systems that made such separations necessary in the first place.
