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Paperback. Condizione: New. 'Monique Roffey is a unique talent and most daring and versatile of writers' - Bernardine EvaristoMarch 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch. A fisherman sings to himself, waiting for a catch - but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn't expect. A beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by the fisherman and and his song. But her fascination is her undoing. She hears his boat's engine again, follows it, and finds herself at the mercy of American tourists. After a fearsome battle, she is pulled out of the sea and strung up on the dock as a trophy. The fisherman rescues her, and gently wins her trust - as she starts to transform into a woman.

Paperback. Condizione: New. John Siddique's poems blast off the page into real life or they can melt as gently as a snowflake on you tongue. If you've not read a poetry book before then this is the one to start with, and if you have, here we go into a new land.Many of the poems in this book were conceived in primary schools, so John has added special bonus material to help you enjoy reading and writing more, and there is an exclusive interview about what it is to be a poet.John Siddique is a poet who writes for both children and adults, and works with schools and teachers to make poetry, creative writing, and reading more accessible.

Paperback. Condizione: New. From the first poem to the last, Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately 'til morning cum.From the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica for some couples, to the manipulation of heterosexual marriage conventions in Barbados in the name of love, to the freedom of sexual abandon and the fulfilment of desire in Amsterdam, this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams. Ultimately, Reader, I Married Him and Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.Dorothea Smartt is a literary activist, live artist, and established and respected poet with an international reputation.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A talking frog, a haughty green cat, an animal fashion show: these are some of the characters and scenes which will delight the many children who enjoyed When Grandpa Cheddi was a Boy.Set mainly in Guyana, these stories of brave, ingenious, kindly and sometimes mischievous animals and children use humour and mystery to provide a strong framework of positive human values which children will instinctively appreciate and digest.Janet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of the Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Hurricane is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the thirteen year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale.Holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over them. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land and torrential rains lash the roof.Inside it is warm, dry, a home. A family huddled together for survival. But the storm hasn't passed yet, and all Joe and his family can do is worry, and wait, and hope.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Strongly recommended." The School LibrarianHurricane was awarded the German Children's Book Prize 1967.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Hurricane is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the thirteen year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale.Holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over them. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land and torrential rains lash the roof.Inside it is warm, dry, a home. A family huddled together for survival. But the storm hasn't passed yet, and all Joe and his family can do is worry, and wait, and hope.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Strongly recommended." The School LibrarianHurricane was awarded the German Children's Book Prize 1967.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice. "It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word is wasted."Andrew McMillan.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice. "It's a cliche of poetry that we often say that it transforms the ordinary; this pamphlet disproves this, showing us that the ordinary and everyday have always been transformational, and Degna's poems allow us to see that. These are poems written from the outskirts -- of cities, of love, of the body -- with a pure distillation of language where no word is wasted."Andrew McMillan.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Slave Song is unquestionably one of the most important collections of Caribbean/Black British poetry to have been published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in 1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer.At the heart of Slave Song are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance, of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of translations (which deliberately reveal the actual untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best contextualise the original poem. It took some time for the displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the supposedly voiceless workers and peasants.This new edition has an afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to these poems after more than twenty years.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Seni Seneviratne's debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries. In 'Cinnamon Roots' Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in 'A Wider View' time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like 'Grandad's Insulin', based on childhood memories, place her in 1950's Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage."Loss, love, memory, from Yorkshire to Sri Lanka and back, Seni Seneviratne's poems delve in and out of a complex history. These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer and performer. She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1951 to an English mother and Sri Lankan father. She has been writing poetry since her early teens and was first published in 1989.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The endless rows of cane were withered and burnt yellowish-brown by the sun. Nearly everywhere the boys looked they saw that the furrows, which were ordinarily straight and neat, were now uneven and jagged with huge lumps of earth, fallen trash and dead weeds. It had taken weeks of dry, sizzling weather to scorch the lushness out of the plantation, to dehydrate the juice out of the cane, and to disfigure the even pattern of the furrows.It is dry season. The small village of Nain is suffering. Its people, livestock and crops have all been affected and things are looking bleak.But Seth Stone and friends Man Boy, Benjie, Double Ugly and Mango Head are determined to take matters into their own hands-with unexpected results.Praise for the original 1960s edition:"Even those who have never experienced a drought will know what it is like after reading this book. By the time the rains finally come the reader has got the idea not only of the heat and hardship, but of the people and the way of life in a Jamaican village. The four boys and their game of 'Rain' are very real, and the almost miraculous outcome of their game is completely believable. Not a book for every child, but one that will make a lasting impression on those who read it."-Children's Book News.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Slave Song is unquestionably one of the most important collections of Caribbean/Black British poetry to have been published in the last twenty years. On its first publication in 1984 it won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and established Dabydeen as a provocative and paradigm-shifting writer.At the heart of Slave Song are the voices of African slaves and Indian labourers expressing, in a Guyanese Creole that is as far removed from Standard English as it is possible to get, their songs of defiance, of a thwarted erotic energy. But surrounding this harsh and lyrical core of Creole expression is an elaborate critical apparatus of translations (which deliberately reveal the actual untranslatability of the Creole) and a parody of the kind of critical commentary that does no more than paraphrase or at best contextualise the original poem. It took some time for the displaced critics to recognise that this prosaic apparatus was as much part of the meaning of the whole as the poems themselves, that Dabydeen was engaged in a play of masks, an expression of his own duality and a critique of the relationship which is at the core of Caribbean writing: that between the articulate writer and the supposedly voiceless workers and peasants.This new edition has an afterword by David Dabydeen that briefly explores his response to these poems after more than twenty years.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Seni Seneviratne's debut collection offers a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love and loss and reflects her personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage.The poems cross oceans and centuries. In 'Cinnamon Roots' Seni Seneviratne travels from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century; in 'A Wider View' time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century; poems like 'Grandad's Insulin', based on childhood memories, place her in 1950's Yorkshire but echo links with her Sri Lankan heritage."Loss, love, memory, from Yorkshire to Sri Lanka and back, Seni Seneviratne's poems delve in and out of a complex history. These tender, moving poems weave a delicate web." Jackie KaySeni Seneviratne is a writer, singer, photographer and performer. She was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1951 to an English mother and Sri Lankan father. She has been writing poetry since her early teens and was first published in 1989.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice "sins" on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Frances Marie Cokeis a poet who has contributed to "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters" and the author of the poetry collection "The Balm of Lilies.".

Paperback. Condizione: New. Following her very well-received Fauna, Jacqueline Bishop's Snapshots from Istanbul is another leap forward in terms of developing an assured signature voice and extending the range of her subject matter. At one level, the collection has the intimacy of the confessional - recorded with self-reflexive frankness and good humour - but this is grounded within the structure of other narratives and voices that create a counterpoint of dialogue in which the lyric 'I' is only one point of reference. Framing the collection are poems that explore the lives of the exiled Roman poet Ovid, and the journeying painter Gaugin. Between their differing reasons for departure and between the invented Ovid's changing perceptions of what exile means, Bishop locates her own explorations of where home might be. Like Gaugin, Bishop is driven by the need to discover one's necessity and do it; but as a woman she also has room to wonder about those abandoned by such quests.At the heart of the collection is a sequence of powerfully sensuous poems about a doomed relationship in Istanbul, touching in its honesty and, as in the best poems about other places, vivid in its portrayal of the otherness, highly conscious of the layers of difference, and aware that the poems' true subject is the uprooted self. Here, inevitably, Bishop is forced to think about her Americanness and her Jamaicanness in different ways.There is one constant: the drive to rearrange words, which is both about and is the act of the rearranging of self.Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She now lives and works in New York City . the 15th parish of Jamaica. The River's Song is her first novel.

Paperback. Condizione: New.

Paperback. Condizione: New. In the fields of whispering sugar cane, the rugged Atlantic coast of crashing breakers and the womb-like gullies of Barbados, the characters in these stories find a landscape which mirrors their inner lives. Set at crucial points in Caribbean history, from slavery to the present; from Nanny, who cannot bear another day's captivity when rumours of slavery's abolition reach the island, to Hilda, returning home after many years in Britain, these are strong and moving portrayals of women attempting to define themselves in situations where power is determined by race and gender.Nanny knows that "neither she nor others could really call their lives their own", but it is not only under slavery that June Henfrey's women confront this fact. In doing so, their lives enlarge our sense of history."In her memorable story, 'The Gully', Quashebah, a slave who is raped and made pregnant by her overseer, flees and seeks sustenance for her secret dreams of freedom in a limestone cave, where she finds both welcome and protection. A particularly deep-rooted story is 'Freedom Come', telling of Nanny, one of the enthusiasts and mobilisers of Bussa's slave rebellion in Barbados in 1816. Henfrey's portrait, convincing and assured, is of an 'old African who had never yielded to the fact of her enslavement. All her characters are of this mettle, whether born of slavery, colonialism or migration, and June Henfrey's stories have left us the words and spirit of a writer and woman whose life and creative impulse was ever to seek freedom and betterment for her people on two sides of an ocean."Chris SearleJune Henfrey was born and grew up in Barbados. She later worked in community education in Liverpool. She wrote the stories in Coming Home during the two years before she died in 1992.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Discover some of the best in speculative short fiction from the Caribbean's up and coming voices. Edited by writer Karen Lord, New Worlds, Old Ways encompasses science fiction, fantasy and more. It is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.Do not be misled by the 'speculative' in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives.Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime and corruption; the universal themes of family with parents and children, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything - old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves - leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, stories.This anthology speaks to the fragility of our Caribbean home, but reminds the reader that although home may be vulnerable, it is also beautifully resilient. The voice of our literature declares that in spite of disasters, this people and this place shall not be wholly destroyed.Read for delight, then read for depth, and you will not be disappointed.Edited by Karen Lord, with stories by Tammi-Browne Bannister, Summer Edward, Portia Subran, Brandon O'Brien, Kevin Jared Hosein, Richard B. Lynch, Elizabeth J. Jones, Damion Wilson, Brian Franklin, Ararimeh Aiyejina and H.K. Williams.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Following her very well-received Fauna, Jacqueline Bishop's Snapshots from Istanbul is another leap forward in terms of developing an assured signature voice and extending the range of her subject matter. At one level, the collection has the intimacy of the confessional - recorded with self-reflexive frankness and good humour - but this is grounded within the structure of other narratives and voices that create a counterpoint of dialogue in which the lyric 'I' is only one point of reference. Framing the collection are poems that explore the lives of the exiled Roman poet Ovid, and the journeying painter Gaugin. Between their differing reasons for departure and between the invented Ovid's changing perceptions of what exile means, Bishop locates her own explorations of where home might be. Like Gaugin, Bishop is driven by the need to discover one's necessity and do it; but as a woman she also has room to wonder about those abandoned by such quests.At the heart of the collection is a sequence of powerfully sensuous poems about a doomed relationship in Istanbul, touching in its honesty and, as in the best poems about other places, vivid in its portrayal of the otherness, highly conscious of the layers of difference, and aware that the poems' true subject is the uprooted self. Here, inevitably, Bishop is forced to think about her Americanness and her Jamaicanness in different ways.There is one constant: the drive to rearrange words, which is both about and is the act of the rearranging of self.Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She now lives and works in New York City . the 15th parish of Jamaica. The River's Song is her first novel.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Frances Marie Cokeis a poet who has contributed to "Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters" and the author of the poetry collection "The Balm of Lilies.".

Paperback. Condizione: New. Fossil explores the impact of human activity on climate change though a post-colonial lens and from the perspective of all life on earth including plants, creatures, elements and inanimate objects. "The poems in Fossil have been waiting millions of years to be born. Maya Chowdhry's language erupts out of deep time, vital and vivid. This is powerful work." Robert MinhinnickFossil explores planet earth as she experiences anthropogenic climate change, it examines the impacts of climate chaos and the resultant implications of climate justice for the human species. The collection takes its subject seriously through a playful testing of language.Voices of plants, trees, fossils, rocks, bodies of water and creatures speak about the human impacts on the climate of our planet. Interspersed with these poems are poems exploring some of the reasons that the earth is being exploited for capital by humans and what this means for all life on earth. Birds, insects and other plants comment on how humans are enslaving them for their gain.The false selling of constellations, what scientists might be releasing when they core into the ice caps and a war over a glacier are all topics for this collection that interrogates the scientific, transmuting the language through the feathers of an albatross, the sap of a Spider Orchid, a Banksia dentata seed bursting into life.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The stories in this collection give an unrivalled picture of the lives of the Indo-Guyanese workers on the sugar estates in the period between the 1930s and the early 1950s when the estate communities broke up. They explore with great insight the ambivalence between accommodation and resistance that characterized estate life. They portray a people subject to the most oppressive forms of labour and managerial authority, sometimes held back by their inner conflicts and superstitions, but invariably engaged in some form of resistance, whether overt, or more frequently scampish schemes for avoiding hard labour or taking some advantage of the estate authorities. Above all, the backdam people resist by refusing to surrender their sense of community and cultural identity.The stories are unblinking in their portrayal of the violence and bawdy of the estate dwellers' lives, celebrating those like Massala Maraj who outwit big Manager but also mourning those who are broken by the punishing years of canefield work. The stories are by turns comic and tragic in their tone, but always in the end sympathetic to the vigorous individuality of people who struggle to live their lives 'according to their own likeness'. This is a landmark collection in its total commitment to the Hindi-influenced Creole of the sugar workers - though a glossary provides help with unfamiliar terms. Above all, these are the backdam people's own stories, told in their own creole tongue and shaped by Monar's skills as a storyteller."The success of Monar's comic treatment is that it enables him to present scenes of gross violence and brutality without sentimentality. We laugh. but do not ignore the cruelty, pain and suffering involved."Frank BirbalsinghRooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Mount Vesuvius in Eight Frames is a slim volume containing eight poems by Sudeep Sen and eight etchings by Peter Standen. The poems are meditations on the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed the Italian city of Pompeii, and the etchings provide pictorial representations of the love-death nexus on which these meditations focus. Together the poems and the etchings evoke an ironic vision of the perennial "macabreness" of the Vesuvian catastrophe. Between them they conjure up an intriguing "idyll" of unlamented mortality, with neither solemnity nor sentimentality attending on the singular phenomenon of death dreaming of life."Joseph John, World Literature TodaySudeep Sen lives and works in New Delhi and London. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS.

Paperback. Condizione: New. John Lestrade is attempting to come to terms with the suicide of his friend Stephen, and his guilt that he did nothing to prevent it. Escape to a room on the hill is an act of internal exile, an attempt to find the space to overcome the inauthentic, automaton quality of his life. But Lestrade's self-loathing despair poisons any hope of reconnecting with his friends. It is only when his friend Derek's abandoned girlfriend is killed in a car crash, and is then refused a proper burial by the Catholic church, that Lestrade is moved to action. In its energy and in its rejection of the colonial straight-jacket that locks in the middle-class intellectuals in the novel, there remains in A Room on the Hill some possibility of honest reflection and escape. Garth St. Omer was born in St Lucia in 1931. During the early 1950s St. Omer was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott. His first publication, the novella Syrop, appeared in 1964, followed by the Faber publications of A Room on the Hill (1968), Shades of Grey (1968), Nor Any Country (1969) and J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders in 1972. In the 1970s he moved to the USA, where he completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1975. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught at the University of Santa Barbara in California. In 2001 he was honoured with the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit for service in the Arts and Literature.

Paperback. Condizione: New. Nii Ayikwei Parkes' début collection encompasses the story of a triangular trade in reverse - a family history that goes from the Caribbean back to Sierra Leone, and in his own life from London to Ghana, and back again.His gift as a poet is for the most rewarding kind of story-telling, including those stories told with wit and an engaging ambivalence about himself. His narratives move unerringly to a perfect punch-line, but in the collection as a whole there is a refreshing lack of complacency in his willingness to move out of his comfort zone and explore areas of imaginative fantasy, as in his Ballast series, a tour de force of defamiliarisation, where he imagines how the slave trade would have gone had its mode of transport been the hot air balloon, rather than the slave ship. There is much humour, but it comes from a family tradition of knowing that 'our jokes weren't really funny, they were just sad/ stories we learned to laugh at'. Like all poets with a largeness of heart, with no embarrassment about embracing the deepest feelings, Parkes has an especial sensitivity to the promise and acute sensitivities of childhood, both his own and others."An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language and the possibilities of both" Ali Smith, The GuardianNii Ayikwei Parkes is the author of three poetry pamphlets. In 2007 he was awarded Ghana's National ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy.

Paperback. Condizione: New. The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education.pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '.you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity. As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.

Paperback. Condizione: New. A young Afro-Guyanese engineer comes to a coastal Kentish village as part of a project to shore up its sea-defences. He boards with an old English woman, Mrs Rutherford, and through his relationship with her discovers the latent violence and raw emotions present in this apparently placid village. He discovers, too, that underlying the village's essential Englishness, echoes of the imperial past resound. In the process, he is forced to reconsider his perceptions of himself and his native Guyana, and in particular to question his engineer's certainties in the primacy of the empirical and the rational. This is a richly intertextual novel which uses reference to the novels of Conrad, Wilson Harris and V.S. Naipaul's 'The Enigma of Arrival' to set up a multi-layered dialogue concerning the nature of Englishness, the legacy of Empire and different perspectives on the nature of history and reality.

Paperback. Condizione: New. From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins' most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz. As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right-and only the ladies live upstairs. Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel.We leave Doux as an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, wondering whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her. In these tender and moving stories, Merle Collins demands that we do not forget such lives. If ghosts appear in several of the later stories, they are surely there to warn that amnesia about the past can leave disturbed and restless spirits behind.In addition to the Doux stories, this collection restores to print an earlier 'Paz' story, Rain Darling, and their juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life.Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.