...think about feeling lucky, like in those opening lines of the Langston Hughes poem "Luck": "Sometimes a crumb falls/ From the tables of joy/ Sometimes a bone is flung." Epler is the president of New Directions and Chew is co-director of publicity; Weinberger--an essayist, editor, and translator, most notably of Octavio Paz--is the one who discovered the book, and Douglas, at the 2017 Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad in April 2017. (Peepal Tree is the major forum for Caribbean writers, with more than 300 books published since 1985, and where many of the writers Weinberger met at the festival have published, or hoped to be published.) He went to Douglas's reading and onstage interview, and was "simply knocked out" by this "panoramic novel that takes place on one corner of Kingston, Jamaica, full of characters, living and dead--from street vendors to historical figures like Marcus Garvey--presented in a multiplicity of voices, with a vibrancy of the English language that was new to me." The book is personal for Douglas, who came to the U.S. to study when she was 19, but came of age in Half Way Tree, which, she explains, is the crossroad in Kingston that separates uptown from downtown, with a clock in the tower that always tells the wrong time: "There's a square where Jamaicans come together, where politicians come to speak, and it's a meeting place of different people from different classes.