When a flood destroys Gavin Weald's home, tearing apart his family and his way of life, he doesn't know how to continue. A year later, he returns to his rebuilt home and tries to start again, but when the new rainy season arrives, so do his daughter's nightmares about the torrents, and life there becomes unbearable. So father and daughter and their dog - embark upon a voyage to make peace with the waters. Their journey will take them far from their Caribbean island home, into other unknown harbours and eventually across a massive ocean. They will sail through archipelagos, encounter the grande... continue
A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more. But to it's residents this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else...Set during World War II and narrated by an unnamed - but precociously observant - neighbourhood boy, Miguel Street is a work of mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy and anarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.
Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview. Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles - just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his "outside-woman," so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political ... continue
In 1960 the government of Trinidad invited V. S. Naipaul to revisit his native country and record his impressions. In this classic of modern travel writing he has created a deft and remarkably prescient portrait of Trinidad and four adjacent Caribbean societies–countries haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism and so thoroughly defined by the norms of Empire that they can scarcely believe that the Empire is ending. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul watches a Trinidadian movie audience greeting Humphrey Bogart’s appearance with cries of “That is man!” He ventures into a Trinidad slum so... continue
Mesmerising, mythic and timeless, the most unmissable debut novel of 2022 now out in paperback - for fans of Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison and Monique Roffey Recommended Read for 2022 in the Observer, New Statesman, Irish Times, Buzzfeed, Good Housekeeping, The Daily Nerd, Essence and more 'BELIEVE THE HYPE' Stella, Sunday Telegraph 'A searing symphony of magic and loss, love and hope... This book just might heal you' Marlon James 'It's a knockout, and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a star. I want to read everything she writes' Niven Govinden Darwin is a down-on-his-luck gravedigger, newly arrived in th... continue