A book featuring the memoirs of several prominent Bermudians will be launched tomorrow as part of this month’s Heritage Month celebrations.

Take This Journey With Me was developed as an offshoot of the Writer in Residence programme, a Department of Community and Cultural Affairs initiative, and edited by award-winning author Rachel Manley.

The book features writers Joanne Ball-Burgess, Lisa Brewster, Catherine Hay, Elizabeth Jones, Mike Jones, Ronald RW Lightbourne, Florenz Webbe-Maxwell, James Morgan, Andrea Oliva Ottley, Kim Dismont Robinson, Sandra Taylor Rouja, Lucinda Spurling, Cindy Swan, Yesha Townsend, Marlene Warren and Grace E Welch.

Ms Manley, the daughter and granddaughter of Jamaica’s best known Prime Ministers, Michael and Norman Manley, said: “Memoir is harder for islanders than fiction or poetry. Memoir hasn’t got the hiding places.

“With fiction you can disguise in any way you wish, having the wide prairie of imaginative possibility. With poetry you have a structure within which to keep enigma safe.

“But memoir, by its nature, calls on us to tell our familiar stories with a promise of truth. And this I think was the greatest challenge for the writers featured here, to own and share secrets of their island, their families and their own.”

A book launch, reading, and reception will be held at the Bermuda Society of Arts at City Hall at 5.30pm, where copies of the anthology will be on sale.