My Brother.

With such books as the award-winning Autobiography of My Mother, the West Indian-born writer Jamaica Kincaid has made her reputation as a candid chronicler of her hate-filled, unprincipled family. Her highly charged prose is full of conflicting feelings for a mother she can't seem to escape. Here she extends the conflict to her brother Devon.

Learning that he is dying of AIDS complications, Kincaid travels to his side back home in their native Antigua. She prolongs his life for three years by securing him American AZT. Still, she barely knows him and isn't sure she loves him.

Only after his death does Kincaid learn that her Rastafarian brother had conflicts of his own. He never told her, or the family, the truth of his secret life as a gay man.

In order "not to die with him," she says, Kincaid decides to write about his dying. Her skill pulls us into the vortex of her family's crisis as well as into the poverty of Antigua, a place where the limited medical resources are reserved for people whose diseases are curable.

Kincaid's stark honesty makes her brother come alive in a way no reverent tribute ever could. "I missed him," she writes after Devon's death. "I missed seeing him suffer....I missed seeing him in the midst of something large and hoping he would emerge from it changed for the better. What I felt might have been love."