The World So Wide by Zilla Jones | The Miramichi Reader

Complex female characters? Check. Historical revolution? Check. Challenging themes of race and class? Check. Opera? Check! The World So Wide by Zilla Jones is a beefy read in more ways than one, spanning decades, countries, nationalities, lovers, and stages. It really has everything, but most importantly it has Felicity, the main character. Felicity Alexander, the haughty opera singer, famed around the world. Felicity Alexander, the first-generation Canadian daughter of a Grenadian woman and an estranged Ukrainian man. Centred around Felicity’s ill-fated trip to Grenada in October of 1983, the novel alternates between the fraught days of Felicity being trapped with old friends and her first love, Claude, during the American invasion of Grenada, and her past, which led her to coming impulsively to Grenada to support her friends and their government.

Felicity is one of the richest characters I’ve had the privilege to read in the last few year: prickly, demanding, selfish, talented and complicated. Felicity managed to claw her way to the top of the opera world by the 1980s, despite being a biracial woman. Race is a problem for her throughout the novel: her Grenadian relatives and friends consider her too light-skinned, while she’s too Black for the opera world. That’s not the only scandal Felicity creates: she has two daughters by two different men, and neither of them her husband. Felicity is sexually liberated and fully in charge of her life and talent; you can imagine she would be a whole crate of dynamite in the twenty-first century.

Consumed by her interpersonal drama and her lifelong longing to fit in somewhere, Felicity takes up with Claude and his friends during her studies in England, trying her best to support their dream of a revolution in Grenada, while knowing her future lies on the stage, performing opera, and not sacrificing her whole soul to a country she feels ties to but does not wholly accept her. The tension between art and politics, and the notion of a hierarchy of what you can do to support the “movement” feels relevant to purity tests in movements in the modern era.

This was just such a rich book. Jones stuffs so many topics into it, but lets each one breathe in the story, taking the time to build a layered world and story, with Felicity’s globe-trotting life bringing all of the disparate threads together. I had such an enjoyable time with this novel, even when Felicity made me want to throw the book across the room. And even when I found myself deep into the world of opera and not having a clue what Jones was talking about. I highly recommend it. The prose is fantastic, the story is fascinating, and Felicity is one of the best characters I’ve read.

Zilla Jones (she/her) is an African-Canadian anti-racist educator, lawyer, mother, and singer of Caribbean, Chinese, and European heritage, writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). She was born in the UK and now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her debut novel, The World So Wide, was published in 2025 by Cormorant Books. She is a winner of the Journey Prize, a winner of the Foreward INDIES Book of the Year Award (Historical), a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award, a winner of the Writers’ Trust Rising Star Award, and a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals including Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and Bayou Magazine.

Publisher: Cormorant Books (April, 2025)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 414 pages
ISBN: 9781770867758

Alison Manley

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Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.