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The Illusion of Freedom
Day Drinkers follows a woman on a Caribbean island desperate to escape her dead-end job who takes a risk captaining a small sailing vessel for a corrupt music artist, sending her into a life-or-death situation. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for Day Drinkers came from the decade I spent living and working in the Caribbean as a travel writer, performer, and liveaboard sailor. I was fascinated by how easily escape and suffering coexist in so-called paradise. The novel is a meditation on the consequences of rejecting society’s rules in pursuit of the illusion of freedom, and on how we choose to either make sense of our past or run from it.
Was there anything from your own life that you put into the characters in your novel?
Absolutely. My books always emerge from lived experience. My debut, Zone Trip, was inspired by the fifteen years I spent with a secret artist society in San Francisco. For Day Drinkers, I drew from a decade of sailing, performing, and working as a travel writer in the Caribbean. I want my stories to feel authentic, so I live them. Most of the characters in Day Drinkers are composites of people I met in the islands, viewed through the lens of absurdism and satire.
Some events in the book were chillingly similar to real-life events. Did you take any inspiration from real life when developing this book?
Yes. Easter Cay, the island at the center of Day Drinkers, was loosely inspired by exclusive enclaves owned by billionaires and celebrities, most notably the infamous Little Saint James, formerly owned by Jeffrey Epstein. As a traveling circus artist, I was hired to perform at private parties for powerful people. This book reflects what happens when wealth and secrecy collide with poverty and desperation—something I witnessed firsthand. While Day Drinkers is a work of fiction, it asks very real questions about complicity, exploitation, and how paradise can become a prison for those who serve it.
What is the next book that you’re working on, and when can your fans expect it out?
My next literary thriller is titled Bufo. It explores the use of spirit medicine and its strange aftermath. In this story, DMT entities begin to manifest as characters. Commercially, it’s in the same vein as Nine Perfect Strangers—but more positive and surreal. From a literary perspective, a major influence is William Burroughs’s Queer, with its raw, unsettling exploration of altered consciousness and outsider desire. Bufo is expected in 2027.
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🏝️ Invited to a party on a forbidden pleasure island
🍹 Swept into the corrupt world of a country music legend
☠️ Flees to Cuba, hunted by drug and human traffickers
🥥 Inspired by the dark reality of Jeffrey Epstein’s world
🌊 Day Drinkers: Where the American Dream washes ashore
From her office window on St. Columba, Gemma gazes out at the mysterious pleasure island just beyond the reef. Owned by country music legend Cowboi Rivers, the exclusive retreat lures the world’s wealthy and powerful with promises of secrecy and illicit pleasures. Meanwhile, the locals keep their distance, wary of the wild parties and whispered rumors of drugs and disappearing girls.
Desperate to escape her dead-end job, Gemma seizes a risky opportunity to captain the sailing vessel Mariposa for Cowboi’s shadowy empire. She finds herself swept into a world of corrupt elites. When a cocaine pickup in the Dominican Republic spirals into a deadly double-cross, Gemma and her crew enlist the aid of a Vodou priestess, a hard-drinking mariner, and a rumba-loving boat boy to escape. With her enemies closing in, Gemma sails toward Cuba, facing a storm that threatens to sweep her away.
Day Drinkers is a tantalizing medley of Saint X and Don’t Stop the Carnival, seasoned with a dash of The Rum Diary. Drawing from her ten years as a liveaboard sailor and Caribbean travel writer, Kitty Turner, an American Absurdism revivalist, delivers a gripping tale of identity and redemption through her unique talent for rollicking storytelling and deep philosophical inquiry.
Day Drinkers
Day Drinkers is a lush, sun-baked story about Gemma, a woman caught between worlds on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Columba. The book follows her tangled life among drifters, hustlers, and dreamers who drink through the heat and chase meaning in the wreckage of paradise. Gemma’s story begins with small talk under a tarp at Boon Dock Marine and unfolds into something much larger, her struggle with identity, survival, and the ghosts of her family’s past. Author Kitty Turner paints the island with heat and texture: the smell of rum, salt, and cheap perfume, the pulse of reggae, and the quiet ache of belonging. This is a story about the people who live in the margins of paradise, where beauty and corruption coexist and survival is an act of endurance.
What I loved most about Turner’s writing is how it feels it rolls over you, thick and heavy, then suddenly clears into moments of stillness. Her sentences swing between gritty and lyrical, giving the island a heartbeat that feels alive. Gemma isn’t an easy heroine, she’s messy, flawed, and stubborn, but she’s real. I found myself rooting for her even when I wanted to shake her. The dialogue feels sharp and natural, full of humor and island slang, and the author never softens the hard edges of poverty, addiction, or moral compromise. The story’s spirituality creeps in like humidity, subtle at first, then impossible to ignore. Turner threads mysticism through realism in a way that feels both grounded and haunting.
The island itself sometimes feels more vivid than the people who inhabit it, and a few side characters blur together. But the novel’s rhythm, its mix of danger, longing, and low-simmering dread, kept me hooked. I admired how Turner doesn’t try to redeem everyone. She just lets them be, in all their contradictions. The result is a book that feels lived-in, like a slow afternoon after too much sun and too little water.
Day Drinkers reads as if Donna Tartt spent a summer in the Caribbean with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s eye for glamour and ruin, spinning a story that smells of salt, sweat, and spilled rum. I’d recommend Day Drinkers to readers who love character-driven stories with atmosphere so thick you can taste it. If you’ve ever wanted a novel that feels like a hangover and a confession rolled into one, this one’s for you.
Pages: 358 | ASIN : B0FLF6MW68
LITERARY TITAN 