RETIRED banker Linley Reynolds was grieving the loss of his mother in January 2023 when he stumbled onto a hobby that has now made him a bit of a celebrity among his family and friends, as well as recognition within the community of readers who purchase books on Amazon.

“It took me by surprise, pleasantly though,” Reynolds told the Jamaica Observer, recalling his reaction when he found out that his book of poems, Mango Time, Pudding, and Something More, stood at number one on Amazon’s new releases during June and September 2024.

“I started to share it with my family members and friends. My family members, they were shocked, because they were saying, ‘How could this happen?’ and everybody started to think, now where will it end, where will the book go?” Reynolds said.

“I have had so many persons calling about the book… each person who gets a copy or buys a copy, whenever they start reading, they do not want to put it down. They enjoy it that much,” added the former Scotiabank executive.

Relating how it all began, Reynolds said when his mom died he started doing some reflections almost immediately.

“When I met with the pastor who was going to do the thanksgiving service, I asked him if I could do the opening sentences. But I did not want to use the same old, same old opening sentences that we would hear whenever we go to a thanksgiving service, so I started to write my own. I wrote the first couple sentences and I said, ‘But no, this is not opening sentences for a thanksgiving service,’ but I continued, and it turned out into a lovely piece,” he said.

However, he was not satisfied.

“I said no, this won’t cut it either, this was like poetry to me and I kept on writing. I shared the pieces with my family members, my wife, my children, my siblings in particular and they said, ‘Listen, keep on writing, because there’s some lovely stuff coming out of it’,” he shared.

“So I eventually did the sentences for the service and then I started to write some pieces regarding our country life, and with each piece, everybody started to laugh, everybody started to enjoy it, and they said, keep on writing.

“I remember my eldest sister said to me, ‘If you do 30 pieces, we will do an anthology.’ I said, alright, sounded interesting. So I did 30 pieces in, I would say, three weeks or thereabouts. And then I still had more stuff to write, so I kept on writing, and I would say within four months or thereabout, all those pieces were written,” he said.

The result is the current book of 54 poems relating his experiences growing up in rural Jamaica.

Asked what influenced the name of the book, Reynolds said he wanted a title that would attract readers.

“I wanted something that people would gravitate towards… so, as Jamaicans, as folks from the Caribbean, we love mango, and there is a piece in there about mango. We also love pudding, so I said to myself: How can I merge both together? and I came up with ‘Mango Time and Pudding’. But then I said, it’s not just ‘Mango Time and Pudding’, there’s something more. That’s how I came up with the name,” he explained.

Buoyed by the Amazon listing and general reaction to the book, Reynolds now wears an even broader smile as he shared that the book is included in the recommended reading list for the course Caribbean Culture: Formation and Approaches in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at The University of the West Indies, Mona.

“All of this took me by surprise, because, first of all, never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would have written a book that reflects our culture… as much as I am fascinated with our culture [and] I’ve always immersed myself in it as a Jamaican,” he said.