Description
Listen carefully: a world within a world echoes in these short stories from Christine Barrow. Here, the unmuffled pulse of Barbados beats. Barrow brings us scenes of family squabbles, bitterly unhappy housewives, superstitious salt-of-the-earth grandmothers, disillusioned scholars burning with subterranean desire, alongside young men brined and buttressed by the sea. Each story skillfully unmasks the lie of an ordinary life, or an ordinary island: these characters wrestle with the ghosts of the Panama Canal; they grow up motherless and rudderless, reaching across the Atlantic towards England, their navel strings planted deep in St. Lucy and Bridgetown.
Barrow artfully arrests miniature details -- a too-sharp crochet hook; a glinting pearl pendant; sea glass that sparkles in sunlight -- and from these fragments and slivers, she assembles potent realities. Her prose confronts the weight of plantocracy and its embedded privilege, in stories that show how Barbadian history seeps into the rum, rebellion and rhythm of contemporary life.
