Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Rhys was born in Roseau in 1890 — her father was the town doctor — and her novel about a Creole heiress in nineteenth-century Jamaica draws on the world of plantation Dominica she knew as a child. The single most important book for understanding Roseau's colonial undertow.
The Orchid House by Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Allfrey was a white Dominican who served as a minister in the brief West Indies Federation. Her 1953 novel traces the decline of a planter family on the island, narrated by their black housekeeper. Still the best fiction about Dominica.
Smile Please by Jean Rhys. Rhys's unfinished autobiography, half of it set in the Roseau of her childhood — funerals, gossip, the colour bar, the priests, the carnival. Wonderful sense of the town.