HARTFORD — Two West Indian authors are scheduled to be at Real Arts Way this month, reading from their latest work.

Jamaican-born Marlon James  and Allison Joseph will read from their latest work Feb. 20 and 21 respectively.

Marlon James is a finalists for both a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and a NAACP Image Award in Literature for his second novel, The Book of Night Women.

The New York Times says this about James’ latest work,   “Marlon James’s second novel is both beautifully written and devastating. While the gruesome history of slavery in the Americas is a story we may dare to think we already know, every page of “The Book of Night Women” reminds us that we don’t know nearly enough. James’s narrative, related in a hard-edged but lilting dialect, takes us back to the cruel world of a Jamaican sugar plantation at the turn of the 19th century.

… at the center of “The Book of Night Women” is a black-skinned, green-eyed slave woman, barely out of childhood, who struggles to transcend the violence into which she is born, a violence that begins with her first breath as a “baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell.”

Born in London to Caribbean parents, Joseph’s latest book, My Father’s Kites, focuses on her father. It is will be published later this month.