New Day (novel) New Day (novel) New Day is a 1949 book by Jamaican author V. S. Reid. It was Reid's first novel. "New Day" deals with the political history of Jamaica as told by a character named Campbell, who is a boy at the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion (in 1865) and an old man during its final chapters. It may have been the first novel to use Jamaican vernacular as its language of narration. Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. Reid was
The Last Day of a Condemned Man looks like to the personality of the prison priest. He does not betray his name or what he has done to the reader, though he vaguely hints that he has killed someone. On the day he is to be executed he sees his three-year-old daughter for the last time, but she no longer recognizes him, and she tells him that her father is dead. The novel ends just after he briefly but desperately begs for pardon and curses the people of his time, the people he hears outside, screaming impatiently for the spectacle of his decapitation. The book is also