The Possibility of Tenderness

Author Jason Allen-Paisant
Narrator Jason Allen-Paisant
Publisher Cornerstone
Publish Date 20 March 2025
Run Time 8 hours and 32 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Autobiography: writers, Environmentalist thought and ideology, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Memoirs, Social and cultural history, Trees, wildflowers and plants: general interest.

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What to expect

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The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England.

Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today.

Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world.

The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.

© Jason Allen-Paisant 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

The Possibility of Tenderness shows Jason Allen-Paisant embarking on a seemingly new genre of writing, that offers a broader poetics that seeks to embrace and not resist the sometimes porous membrane separating traditional genres. The Possibility of Tenderness is a work rooted in an intimate engagement firstly the history of survival, creativity and resistance in the rural grung, the land of Clarendon, Jamaica, and secondly, with his own body's relation to this place. Allen-Paisant's work unfolds with a sense of spirit, sensibility, memory and intellectual acuity to give us what is, no doubt, a beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning. Lick shot!

Kwame Dawes, author of STURGE TOWN

Profound and lyrical, The Possibility of Tenderness is intimate in the telling and epic in reach, an exploration of colonial power and collective memory told from the ground up. The Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant said it was the role of the writer to craft a 'language of landscape' that affirmed the relationship between Caribbean people and the natural world, and in this task Jason Allen-Paisant delivers beautifully.

Ekow Ekshun, author of THE STRANGERS

A work of delicacy, wonder, and - yes - great tenderness, which excavates a history at once familial and national, local and global. The story reaches from the adult life Allen-Paisant has made for himself in Leeds, England - one of happiness, but tinged with a sense of estrangement from the natural world, and social class, he grew up in - back to his mother, and her inherited plot of land in Coffee Grove, Jamaica. With shadings of Kei Miller and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Allen-Paisant is an inspired recorder of the wisdom that his mother, the community around her, and the island itself, have to share.

Sarah Howe, author of LOOP OF JADE

This book drives at the heart of mankind's 'great separation', our mistaken belief that we are superior to the natural world. In The Possibility of Tenderness, Allen Paisant weaves together his family history and lore, Jamaican knowledge of plants, the enclosure of common land in the UK, the later colonisation of the Caribbean islands, his own love of the green world, his understanding of the function of dreams, and yet refuses a happy ever after bucolic ending. . . In today's time of a climate emergency, Allen-Paisant has written a timely and relevant book which joins the dots between the enclosures and clearances of common land in the British isles and the colonisation of islands and continents elsewhere. I found this book strangely restorative and tenderly written. Hold it in your hands and then dream of the green world

Monique Roffey, author of PASSIONTIDE

This exceptional book explores the complexity of human experience, from family to colonialism and class, through an intimate, lyrical voice and sentences that sing. A transformative, absorbing work.

Sinu00e9ad Gleeson, author of HAGSTONE

An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer: a new song of the earth. It left me gripped, moved, fascinated, troubled and heartlifted. It rings and sings with curiosity and compassion; it sees with clear eyes and speaks with lucid, wise voice. 'We are made of our environments', Allen-Paisant writes deep in these remarkable pages, 'They enter us, shape us and change us . . . But what happens when we do not allow the earth to get into us?' These are the questions at the heart of his book: he answers them in a luminous and loving prose, attentive both to exclusion and reciprocity, always seeking to dream new possibilities of tenderness. It is a book that will be widely read and justly celebrated

Robert Macfarlane

This evocative, absorbing memoir is an ode to nature which explores a hidden Jamaica beyond globalisation's avarice and the tourist gaze. An emotionally intelligent book written in beautifully crafted prose, it is grounded in the landscape and old ways of knowing

Professor Corinne Fowler, author of OUR ISLAND STORIES

'The Possibility of Tenderness' is an unforgettable read that had me reaching for my journal consistently, urgent with my wish to capture all of the beauty in real time as I read.

Tice Cin, author of KEEPING THE HOUSE

Jason has taken us on another parallel and even more tender journey through to Mama our own grandmother, to end with one hand in Mommy's and the other in his daughter's and we are skipping along all of the same age and physical capacity

Erna Brodber

With The Possibility of Tenderness, Jason Allen-Paisant embroiders a delicate tapestry made of the patiently collected threads of personal achievement and colonial history. A necessary journey in which poetry claims its full part. A must read

Gerty Dambury, author of THE RESTLESS

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