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Most migrants arrive at their destinations by a combination of serendipity and choicelessness. The question – how did you arrive here? – is always answered with a convoluted mix of myth, love, family ties, budget, language, persecution, opportunity and interruption. This has been Nii Parkes' own experience, and in South of South he brings together a distinguished selection of contemporary writers who feel the same way. With stories from Romesh Gunesekera, Zoe Wicomb, Nam Le, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Tahmina Anam, Brian Chikwava, Niki Aguirre, Junot Diaz and Naomi Alderman, this is a rich mix of writing re-imagining the dynamics of migration in the 21st century.Nii Ayikwei Parkes was born in the UK and raised in Ghana. A former Poet-in-Residence at the Poetry Café, he has performed on major stages across the world, including at The Royal Festival Hall and at the London Mayor's vigil on July 14, 2005 in response to the London bombings. His most recent collection is The Makings of You (Peepal Tree, 2010). His poem 'Tin Roof' was selected for Poems on the Underground in 2007 and his novel Tail of the Blue Bird was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. Nii also co-edited the groundbreaking Tell Tales: Volume I short story anthology (2005) with Courttia Newland.

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Wayne Brown's On the Coast was first published in 1972. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the UK and established Brown as one of the finest young poets of the post-Walcott generation. It was followed in 1988 by Voyages, a collection that amply showed the maturing of Brown's remarkable gifts but was rarely available. Now, long after some of the 'revolutionary' poets are forgotten, it is possible to see that Brown's work has been seminal in Caribbean poetry, both for its intrinsic qualities, and for Brown's crucial role as the mentor of a current generation of Caribbean poets. This edition restores the original text of the 1972 edition and adds the new poems first published in the later collection.Wayne Brown's poems approach the issues of creativity, finding meaning, finding contentment and the threats to these human goals through poems about Caribbean nature (his bestiary of sea creatures makes him a Caribbean Ted Hughes); through anecdote, frequently drawing on family life; through poems about favourite artists such as Neruda, Nabakov, Rilke and the Tobagan poet Eric Roach; through reflecting on the rewards and pain of remaining in the Caribbean compared to the loss suffered by those writers and artists who left the islands.Best known as one of the Caribbean's most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column In Our Time appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers

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When they first began to appear in the 1930s, George Campbell's poems blasted through the colonial Victorianism of contemporary Jamaican poetry. Dubbed 'the poet of the revolution' by Jamaica's founding political father, Norman Manley, Campbell was the one Caribbean poet whom Derek Walcott acknowledged as an inspiration.Campbell wrote about the struggle for independence and the appalling social conditions that drove the Jamaican masses to revolt, and about the rising consciousness of black Jamaicans after centuries of oppression. He wrote out of a consciousness of history and religious faith, a faith in which, for him, Jesus and Lenin were not incompatible icons. He also wrote about love, its ecstasies and bitter disappointments, and some of his very best poems are luminous celebrations of Jamaica's natural beauty.George Campbell was born of Jamaican parents in Panama in 1916 and lived variously in Columbia and Costa Rica before returning to Jamaica. He became intensely involved in the nationalist movement and with the Manley family, who championed the poetry he was beginning to write. First Poems appeared in 1945. In the same year, Campbell migrated to New York, where he worked in theatre and dance. In 1978, he returned to Jamaica, working as a consultant to the Institute of Jamaica and the People's National Party archives. In 1994 he returned to New York, where he died in 2002.

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Walter Castle is festering with dissatisfactions in the Laventille slum in Port of Spain. As the prospect of promotion recedes and the threat of crime and lawless and rootless youth become ever more insupportable, he begins to think of going back to the village community he grew up in. But as Lovelace shows in a series of flashbacks, the force of nostalgia is not supported by actual memory, though Walter constantly tries to deceive himself that it is. Set in a 'present' of 1956 when political change was coming to Trinidad, once Walter abandons the dream of return, he is forced to choose between becoming one of the drones who passes through life without making any mark on it, or standing up for himself in a way that only makes sense if he is engaged with others.When this, Earl Lovelace's first and politically most explicit novel, was first published in 1965, it could be seen as an astringent critique of the top-down authoritarianism of nationalist politics. Its emphasis on a world where decent people like Walter Castle feel that crime and violence is destroying the social body appears, 45 years later, to be uncomfortably contemporary.Earl Lovelace was born in 13 July 1935. He is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer.

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Shortlisted for the Guyana Prize Caribbean Award 2011.Dog-Heart is a novel about the well-meaning attempt of a middle-class single mother to transform the life of a boy from the ghetto who she meets on the street. Set in present-day, urban Jamaica, Dog-Heart tells the story from two alternating points of view – those of the woman and the boy. They speak in the two languages of Jamaica that sometimes overlap, sometimes display their different origins and world views. Whilst engaging the reader in a tense and absorbing narrative, the novel deals seriously with issues of race and class, the complexity of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change by their own actions."Diana McCaulay's debut novel Dog-Heart is a harsh and poignant tableau ... exploring the relationship between poverty, education, and crime, and tying those back to a national history of violence, violation, and wilful neglect. McCaulay, an environmental activist, submitted her then-unpublished manuscript to the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission's National Creative Writing Competition in 2008 and won the gold medal... The book is a passionate plea for child poverty alleviation couched in a laudable literary format."Lisa Allen-Agostini, Caribbean Review of Books

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When Sylvia Ann Russell's louche and philandering English father is murdered in scandalous circumstances, she soon discovers that for a young woman with a black mother, 1930's Georgetown is a place of hazard. This is a world where men seek either respectable wives from 'good' families, or vulnerable young women to exploit. Here the fall from respectability to prostitution at the Viceroy Hotel can be all too rapid. The Life and Death of Sylvia is a pioneering and affecting novel of social protest over the fate of women in a misogynist world – and a richly imagined study of character, that inhabits Sylvia's psyche with great inwardness. But Mittelholzer's ambition extends beyond character and protest. His goal is to present Sylvia's individual fate as cosmically meaningful, both when she redeems herself by reclaiming her own story through writing, and by making her story part of the larger patterns of sex and death, creativity and decay, sound and silence that he composes in this onwards surging 'Georgetown symphony' of life.Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

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This visionary novel follows the inner journey of Zechariah Stevenson, the son of a wealthy Georgetown businessman, while he works as the watchman at a timber depot deep within the interior. Isolated in the forest and having endured the suspicion of a fraud scandal, the mysterious death of his father, and the disappearance of his mistress, Zechariah begins a journey of self-discovery as he deconstructs previously held certainties about life by losing himself in nature. An immensely sensuous evocation of Guyanese flora and fauna and its potential impact on the imagination, this classic novel, first published in 1964, is a profound plea for an ecological vision of mankind's relationship to nature.

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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.

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In this collection, the uncertain paths of childhood and adulthood are traced through a sequence of poems that treat Idlewild--a place deep in the heart of rural Jamaica--as a character, a constant that serves as a reliable touchstone for memory. Although the majority of the poems are centered on themes of security and pleasant memory, the edges are haunted with truths of rupture in family relations, abandonment, loneliness, resentment of unreliable men, and the challenges of maintaining faith through difficult times. Balancing nostalgia for the past with an acute awareness of the present--the poverty, violence, class divides, and racial complexities of modern day Jamaica--the central voice of the poem matures along with the subject matter to gradually unveil a well-formed poetic voice with an authoritative command of form and language.

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She Who Sleeps With Bones was named a 2009 Jamaican bestseller in Jamaica Gleaner 'Local books did it big in 09'.In Tanya Shirley's She Who Sleeps With Bones, the hauntings of memory and the spiritual lead us to eloquently shaped epiphanies that turn what appear at on the surface to be simple and tidy stories into profound meditations on the human condition. Shirley acts as a witness to the lives of those around her, yet she is a biased witness, one who has become so enmeshed in the lives of her 'characters' that gradually we become convinced that she has erased the lines that would allow us to distinguish her from the people who enter her work. The collection is anchored by a series of spiritual poems that beautifully enact the mysteries of inner sight and clairvoyance of a poet who is a reluctant seer, who comes from a family of seers. Her reluctance arises from the toll that sight brings to the poet - the burden of feeling, and speaking the truths that haunt. And yet for all its spiritual intelligence, these are poems of earthy sensuality and celebratory humor that are fully rooted in the every day details of living, loving, fearing, laughing and hoping. Shirley's poems are beautifully crafted and they reveal her deft handling of syntax and musicality. She is as meticulous in her choice of words and images as she is in her honesty of emotion and risk-taking. Ultimately, however, it is the resilience of her joy that remains with us after each poem - for all its complications, (and there are many explored here - deaths of dear friends and relatives, the anxieties of being an alien in another country, the perils of unrequited love, the importance of size in sexual play, and the premonitions of tragedy) the world is ultimately full of wonder and joy for Tanya Shirley, a joy that she manages to make sublimely contagious.Tanya Shirley was born and lives in Jamaica. Her work has appeared in Small Axe and The Caribbean Writer and in New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (ed. Kei Miller, Carcanet, 2007.)

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Bougainvillea Ringplay is the long awaited second collection by Marion Bethel, a poet who has long established herself as one of the most necessary voices in Caribbean poetry. These poems are finely crafted works that reveal a maturity of voice and a distinctive use of language that delves into the fruitful place of intersection between her Bahamian dialect and the English that she plies as a lawyer. Marion Bethel's poems reveal a mastery of syntax that one finds in only the most sophisticated poets. Her poems eschew all but the most utilitarian of punctuation marks, (question marks, apostrophes, and inverted commas), but commas, periods, colons, dashes are all ignored, thus demanding everything of rhythm and syntax.The achievement of these poems is that they read with such control of sound and breath that such markers seem completely superfluous in her hands. Her poems are rooted in the landscape of the Bahamas, and so we will find the flora, we will find the sea, we will find the food, we will find the dialect, and yet we are never for a moment allowed to imagine this place as a cliché, as a tourist location. Instead, Bethel's sharp sense of detail, her unsettling truth-telling, and the risks she takes with narratives about love and hurt in all kinds of relationships open for us an emotional intelligence that is arresting. History is constantly present for her, and it is hard to walk away from her poems without feeling as if you have finally met her homeland.These poems are sensual in the most literal sense - the poems are about the senses, the smell of vanilla and sex, the sound of waves - radio, voices, sea; the taste of crab soup; the texture of hurricane wind, and the chaos of colors bombarding the eye. Bahamian poetry is being defined in the work of Marion Bethel and in Bougainvillea Ringplay she is doing so with grace.Marion Bethel was born in the Bahamas where she currently lives and works.

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While on assignment for the Virginia Quarterly Review to report on the impact of HIV/AIDS on Jamaica, Kwame Dawes could not prevent himself from writing poems in response to the stories he heard. In a way journalism is not designed to do, these poems pare away detail to reveal the truths of character and situation, and find forms which both give expression to and find a kind of perfection for fleeting, difficult lives. These poems became, in time, this, his fourteenth collection of verse. Powerfully illustrated by Joshua Cogan's photographs, the art of Dawes's poems makes it impossible to see HIV/AIDS as something that only happens to other people, and to marginalise their lives. Here, the experience of the disease becomes the channel for dramas that are both universal and unique, voices that are archetypal and highly individual – stories of despair and stoicism, deception and self-honesty, misery and joy in life.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Tell Tales Four is a groundbreaking collection of short stories from the UK-based Tell-Tale literary collective. Taking as its theme, The Global Village, Tell-Tales 4 has drawn writers together from around the world. Set in India, Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad, New York, London, cyberspace and the future, the stories are ambitious and very contemporary. Love, sex, death, war, global warming, immigration and crime are just some of the topics stories treat in often dark and funny ways. We are introduced to drug smugglers, a call-centre workers, tourists, ghosts and even a talking robotic job. The twenty-six stories bring together exciting new talents and the work of established writers such as Caribbean luminary Olive Senior, well-known UK-based authors such as Matt Thorne, Sophie Woolley and Adam Thorpe; award-winning travel writer Justin Hill, hip hop journalist Michael Gonzales and Next Gen poet and short story writer Catherine Smith. There is a huge variety of individual voices, but what unites all the writers is a passionate commitment to telling stories and exploiting the possibilities of the short story form.The Tell-Tales collective was founded by the novelist and short-story writer Courttia Newland and the writer and literary activist Nii Parkes of Flipped Eye Press in 2003.

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Whether set in the Jamaican past or the Miami present, whether dealing wittily with sexual errantry, inventively with manifestations of the uncanny (when Brother Belnavis tangles with a vampire), or disturbingly with teenage homophobia, Geoffrey Philp's second collection displays again the gold stamp of the born story-teller. But beyond their capacity to engage and entertain the reader, these are the multi-layered stories of a perceptive and humane observer of contemporary life. In particular, an acute empathy with troubled childhoods and adolescence offers adult readers a rewarding reconnection with the turbulence of earlier selves. There is great variety here – a lively mash-up of genres and styles. There are stories that work with quietly understated stealth – casual talk around a game of dominoes in 'Beeline Against Babylon' reveals a deep undercurrent of affection between father and son – and stories that have a ragga boldness and laugh-out-loud inventiveness, but throughout them all there runs the signature of an engaging personal voice.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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Raman Mundair's second collection of poems sees her expanding her territory to create a new poetic geography. Her voice dances with her love for the language and life of the Shetland Islands through the anguish of war to the movement of people and the crossing of boundaries. She brings to all a combination of passion and compassion, sensitivity and sensuality.The collection encompasses poems written in the Shetland dialect, narratives of thwarted desire and a sequence of poems which explore the dynamics and historical by-ways of the waltz.Raman Mundair is a writer and artist. She was born in Ludhiana, India and came to live in the UK at the age of five. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Choreographer's Cartography and Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves.

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For readers of West Indian literature, a study of Eric Roach requires no justification. He is the most significant poet in the English-speaking Caribbean between Claude McKay (who spent nearly all of his life abroad) and Derek Walcott. Roach would be celebrated as the leading poet of Trinidad, were he not overshadowed by Walcott, a native of Saint Lucia strongly associated with Trinidad. Roach began publishing in the late 1930s and continued, with a few interruptions, until 1974, the year of his suicide. His career thus spans an extraordinary period of Anglophone Caribbean history, from the era of violent strikes that led to the formation of most of the region's political parties, through the process of decolonization, the founding and subsequent failure of the Federation of the West Indies (1958-1962), and the coming of Independence in the 1960s. This book presents a critical analysis of all of Roach's published poetry, but it presents that interpretation as part of a broader study of the relations between his poetic activity, the political events he experienced (especially West Indian Federation, Independence, the Black Power movement, the "February Revolution" of 1970 Trinidad), and the seminal debates about art and culture in which he participated. Laurence Breiner establishes Roach's particular importance in his thinking about the relation between poetry as 'High Art' and the products and elements of popular culture, and his sense of the place of the folk, their language and customs in Caribbean life. Throughout his career, as the study establishes, Roach steadily reflected on the salient issues of West Indian life in poetry of vigor and authority. Breiner shows persuasively that Roach's poetry was impressively crafted and worthy of discussion in its own right, but he argues that it is especially valuable because of its engagement with the events and forces that shaped the societies of the contemporary Caribbean. By exploring his work within its conditions, this book aims above all to confirm Roach's rightful place among West Indian and metropolitan poets of comparable gifts and accomplishments.

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Opal Palmer Adisa employs the modes of autobiography, dramatic monologues, lyrical observations, encomiums, prose poems and prophetic rants in a collection that enacts the construction of a sense of identity whose dimensions encompass a Rastafarian sense of inner 'i-ness', gender, race, geography, the spiritual, the social and the political. In several poems, Palmer speaks through the voices of iconic historical figures such as Phyllis Wheatley, who after the process of cultural loss and enforced imitation finds her own voice, or a ghostly Nat Turner who speaks as an invisible presence in the white world storing away his knowledge of that world to use the next time round. There are contemporary icons, too, such as the late Audrey Lorde, Barbara Christian and June Jordan, strong women who are held up as models of writers committed to the responsibility of speaking out, of pursuing beauty in their writing and personal relationships, of supporting community and fighting injustice. Palmer speaks more directly of self in poems that explore the experience of being a Black person in the world of Oakland, poems which range from a pained but empathetic response to the racial transformations of Michael Jackson, her experience of Black male chauvinism in the classroom and a moving account of the senility of a beloved grandmother. The empathy in Opal Palmer Adisa's work is nowhere more clearly seen than in "Ancestry", a poem that rejects the customary practice of choosing only the past's heroes to relate to, embracing both rebels and betrayers, fighters and the acquiescent: 'i claim all of them/ and you who turned against us/ and led them to our secret place.../ i claim you aunt jemima/ and uncle tom.../ we are all one family...' Then, almost at the end of the collection, comes a poem called "Beyond the Frame" that in its oblique but inescapable images of childhood sexual abuse, suddenly begins to suggest what kind of act of will has gone into the construction of an 'I' who is 'an incisor gnawing my way.'

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In 1786, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, penniless and needing to escape the consequences of his complicated love life, accepted the position of book-keeper on an estate in Jamaica. The success of his Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect made this escape unnecessary. Thus far is historical fact. In Andrew Lindsay's novel, Burns indeed goes to Jamaica and then to the Dutch colony of Demerara where, into the world of sugar and slavery, he brought his propensity for falling in love, his humanity and his urge to write poetry. In 1997 a small mahogany chest is found in a Wai Wai Amerindian village in Guyana. It contains Burns' journal from 1786 to 1796, when he died. Andrew Lindsay's novel is a work of imaginative invention, poetic description and meticulous historical reconstruction. As a fellow Scot who has settled in Guyana, Lindsay brings an incomer's fresh eye to the Caribbean landscape and imaginative insights into how Burns as a man of his times might have responded to slavery. Not least, Illustrious Exile contains some brilliant versions of Burns' poems, as written in the Caribbean.Andrew O. Lindsay was born in Scotland and now splits his time between Fife and Guyana. Illustrious Exile is his first novel.

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This sequal to Seecoomar's well-received "Contributions towards the Resolution of Conflict in Guyana" moves beyond his historical and theoretical analysis of the causes of ethnic conflict and the principles on which resolution might be based, to proposing practical suggestions for finding a way out of the current political impasse. At the heart of his argument is the desirability of devolving as much power away from the centre and restoring to village and township communities, within regional frameworks, the kind of local governance that was largely harmonious before competition for central power brought Guyana to a state of continuous, simmering ethnic civil war. But, Seecoomar recognises that Guyana's problems cannot all be solved at the local level, and he devotes intensive analysis to various models for power-sharing at the national level to replace the disastrous consequences of the 'first-past-the-post' Westminster parliamentary system. His proposal for 'alternating' government is both novel and provocative, addressing the need for both inclusion for both major ethnic groups and for responsible opposition. The final section of his book addresses the question of leadership in an ethnically divided society.

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Velma Pollard has developed a significant following among her fellow Jamaicans and in the wider Caribbean world. In this collection she will delight these -- and new readers -- with her capacity to unite the personal and the political in a seamless whole. Organized into three sections, the collection explores underlying political concerns, such as the impact of global culture, the dangers of unobstructed American power, and the threat of Islamist opposition. The poems move beyond these problems, however, ultimately seeking resolution through understanding the flow of nature and urging a celebration of life.Velma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

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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.

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What brings Charlo Pardie, a peasant farmer on the edge of old age, to leave his wife, family and land and take himself to the house of Ismene L'Aube, known to all as a prostitute? And what, three years later, takes him home again? Earl Long writes with great empathy but no sentiment about two people who are desperate for fulfilment and choice, but who, at crucial moments in their lives, give way to their impulses or to the imperatives of the moment and pay for their decisions with an inevitability that Thomas Hardy would have seen as a truth of life. In portraying the intertwining of their lives from the point where Charlo, out respect to her late father, takes the teenage Ismene into his home as an adopted daughter, Earl Long creates a powerful narrative of a forbidden attraction that neither is able to resist, made tragic by their chastened sense of responsibility for their actions. Set in a small Caribbean island (with strong resemblances to St Lucia), where human life is always subject to the hostilities of nature, Earl Long draws a vivid and inward portrait of a rural community with all its tensions between a desire for pleasure and a fearful sense of an all seeing and judgmental God. By contrast, the novel deals with the effects of mental illness, infidelity, abortion, greed, murder, love and friendship on family ties with compassionate understanding.

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"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.

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Marvella Payne is twenty-seven, works as a secretary for British Rail and has pledged to the congregation of the Church of the Holy Spirit that she will abstain from sex before marriage. When she repulses the groping hands of the trainee-deacon, Carlton Springle, she resigns herself to growing old with her mother, father and Bible-soaked aunts. But Aunt Julie has other ideas and finds Marvella a penfriend from her native Guyana. When good fortune allows the couple to meet, Marvella awakens to new possibilities as she realises how bound she has been by the voices of her dependent, cossetted childhood. But will marriage be another entrapment, another loss of self?"Gather the Faces has a happy ending and is written with Gilroy's characteristic clarity of description and fluency of language. Its optimism shimmers, its spirituality glows in the beautiful verses quoted from the Biblical Song of Songs, and the reader is revivified as faith in love is restored."Phyllis Briggs-Emmanuel, The Caribbean WriterBeryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

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'I am Margaret Saunders... call me the eavesdropper...'No-one tells Margaret anything openly - what has happened to her father, the cancer taking over her mother's body and why her grandmother starts seeing faces pressing through invisible cracks in her bedroom wall. So, with an intuitive sense that uncovering the truth will free the household from its bondage, Margaret starts hiding in cupboards and under beds. But as an 'over-imaginative' 14 year old who is, in her family's view, refusing to grow up, she is acutely vulnerable to feeling that she is in some way responsible for what she uncovers. Set in Guyana in midst of the 1960s racial disturbances, Web of Secrets makes suggestive connections between divisions in the family and the nation. It embroiders a dazzling fabric of whispered family conversations, fantasy and Guyanese folklore. It warns of the psychic hazards of trying to suppress the past and proclaims the redemptive power of truth in the process of healing.Denise Harris was born in Guyana, the daughter of the novelist Wilson Harris. She works for UNICEF in New York. She is also a photographer.

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Persaud enriches Caribbean poetry by bringing to it new dimensions of imagery and philosophical tradition from his Indian ancestry. The imagery of cobra and Kundalini from Tantric Yoga mesh with a political and personal engagement with both Guyana and more recently Canada. He draws on the vast repertory of stories and characters from the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata as pertinently as other Caribbean poets have drawn on archetypes drawn from ancient Greek or Biblical sources. His passage from Guyana to Canada and contact with the wider South Asian diaspora both draws him towards a broader sense of 'Indianness' and leads him to reflect on the unique Indo-Guyaneseness of his formative years. This is a meeting of a thoroughly modern sensibility with the riches of an ancient tradition. Persaud is a poet who, in the words of Howard Fergus in The Caribbean Writer, has to be taken seriously as an 'architect of the subconscious'.Sasenarine Persaud was born in Guyana. He has published two novels, a collection of stories and four collections of poetry. He currently lives and works in the USA.

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The Woolgatherer gives us the richest kind of autobiography: tentative, questioning, multi-layered and shot through with vivid memories. There is a refreshing astringency of vision, a cathartic toughness in the way Gray's poetry confronts the remembered humiliations of childhood poverty, adult disappointments and mature regret. But though there is a shunning of all false consolations, there is room for wry and stoic humour which prevents any tendency to bleakness in these poems. There is also celebration of moments of joy and those persons such as the Misses Norman and Miss Maingot who offered the liberating gift of education and access to books.Above all, Gray's poetry consistently delights both mind and the senses with its inventiveness and rigour in the working out of metaphor, the taut energy of its rhythmic patterns and sometimes rhyme.Cecil Gray was born in Trinidad in 1923 and has had a distinguished career as a Caribbean educator. He now lives in Canada.

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Beryl Gilroy transports the reader back to the Guyanese village of her childhood over sixty years ago to meet such characters as Mr Dewsbury the Dog Doctor, Mama Darlin' the village midwife and Mr Cumberbatch the Chief Mourner. It was a time when "children did not have open access to the world of adults and childhood had not yet disappeared", and perhaps for this reason, the men and women who pass through these stories have a mystery and singularity which are as unforgettable for the reader as they were for the child.Beryl Gilroy brings back to life a whole, rich Afro-Guyanese village community, where there were old people who had been slaves as children and Africa was not forgotten."Beryl Gilroy is an artist. She wields her pen the way an artist wields a paintbrush. A few firm lines, a few quick strokes, a touch of color here, a splash of color there, precise shading elsewhere, and presto! A portrait in miniature. Gilroy's vignettes in her collection entitled Sunlight on Sweet Water, do indeed dance like sunlight on the sweet water of the Caribbean or sunlight reflected from Guiana's numerous waterways. They are pithy portraits of persons, places, objects, and events which allow the Caribbean reader to revel in nostalgia and permit the non-Caribbean a peek into that part of the region that is not dressed up to lure tourists. These short pieces reveal the heart and soul of the area and remind the world that the Caribbean, travel brochures to the contrary, is not just a playground for the idle and not-so-idle rich. The Caribbean is home to those persons who have traveled out, and to those who have remained to keep the hearth burning and the heart alive and well." Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel, The Caribbean WriterBeryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.

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Rich in image, sonority and wit, Ralph Thompson's poems are the fruits of a maturity which has learned to confront the facts of life and death with both exuberance and dread. Humane and finely crafted, his poems are firmly rooted in Caribbean particularity, but are universal in their concerns. He has the story-teller's gift which grips, then leaves the reader pondering on the subtleties beneath the surface. This collection will establish him as a serious voice in West Indian poetry."First rate poetry... intelligent and gifted with a sense of humour."Louis Simpson, The Caribbean Review of BooksRalph Thompson is a Jamaican poet. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including The London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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When the first East Indian intellectuals emerged in British Guiana at the end of the nineteenth century, most of their compatriots were still working as indentured or free labourers on the colony's sugar estates. Indians were conscious that they were looked down on as barbarous 'coolies' by other sections of the population. In response, the intellectual elite constructed a view of India, drawn from the writings of Max Muller and Tagore, which provided the Indo-Guyanese community with a sustaining sense of self-esteem and the sources of its resistance to colonialism.Focusing on individuals such as Joseph and Peter Ruhomon, JA Luckhoo and WH Wharton, the study looks at the way the beginnings of the nationalist movement in India stimulated such individuals to start defining the nature of their presence in the New World. Seecharan argues that while the vision of 'Mother India' stimulated the community's cultural revival, it constrained the way it thought about Guyana."Dr. Seecharan's research is meticulous and his analysis penetrating. This is why, despite its specific Indian focus and slender look, India offers much insight into the broader history of Guyanese society as a whole."Frank BirbalsinghClem Seecharan was born in Guyana. He currently teaches on the Caribbean Studies programme at the University of North London.

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Abandoned by her husband, Saburan leaves her village to work in town. She drifts into the employment of Alamin, a small cog in the business of exporting illegal migrants from Bangladesh to the Gulf States. When she is arrested as keeper of a brothel for women in transit, she becomes the State Witness in the trial of her employer. Though the Defence finds surprising grounds within the tenets of Islam for their acquittal, both Saburan and Alamin find that, as small fish, the sharks of the immigration racket are not easy to escape. Told through the narratives of Saburan and Alamin in their prison cells, and the drama of the court sessions, The State Witness is a powerful satire on corruption and religious hypocrisy.In Osman Jamal's lively translation, English readers have, for the first time, the chance to appreciate a small part of the humanity and richness of Shaukat Osman's work."... the force of its human commitment and satirical brilliance is a timeless achievement." Chris Searle, Morning StarShaukat Osman is the grand old man of Bangladeshi writing. Now in his 70s, he has more than 30 volumes of fiction, poetry and drama behind him. He died in 1997.

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They were all beggars at the gate, thinks Asha, as she joins the vast queue for visas outside the American Embassy. In a corrupt, seedy dictatorship, whose citizens feel it's a prison outside too, what else is there to do? But the option of escape is not open to, or desired by all. There are other choices to be made. Should Jagru quit the opposition and try to influence the ruling party from within? When will Manu's luck with smuggling run out? Where is Lal's duty? With his family or fighting the Government? Is Chandi's concern with her children enough?In a country uncommonly like Guyana of the 1980s, a state beset by economic collapse, political dictatorship and social corruption, Narmala Shewcharan's skilfully constructed novel brings together the lives of five interlinked sets of characters. Without imposing easy judgements, Narmala Shewcharan takes us inside the choices her characters make, and their price. Whilst her vision of their nightmarish world is bleak in portraying the human costs of social fragmentation, the novel also asserts the moral basis of community in the very web of effect each individual choice has on the lives of others.Narmala Shewcharan was born in Guyana where she worked as a journalist. She now works as a university lecturer and anthropologist in London.

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Cyril Dabydeen's poems deal with the experience of living within two cultures, a present of the cool landscapes and growing security of Canada, and a past of tropical poverty and disorder experienced in the Corentyne district of Guyana. Yet even as the poems record a growing immersion in the textures of Canadian life, memories of Guyana surface with stubborn persistence, feeding his complex sensibility. What he achieves is a vision of the interpenetration of the two landscapes, a doubleness of seeing which is richly rewarding."Dabydeen grew up in Guyana and his ability to speak from both Caribbean and Canadian contexts gives much of his work its power. He's at his best here in his expansive voice - an exciting collection." Bronwen Wallace"The poet displays a narrative gift that seems to root his poetry securely in the actual rather than the abstract - the poetry achieves a complexity of tone and attitude."Jeffrey RobinsonCyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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These powerful and original poems are the expression of a life which spans a childhood on the sugar estates of Guyana, a young manhood involved with such liberating spirits of the anti-colonial movement in the Guyanese arts as Martin Carter, Wilson Harris and Ivan Van Sertima, the painful decision to go into exile and years of disillusion in Britain. Yet though some of these poems stare into the face of despair, the collection as a whole expresses a visionary faith in the regenerative power of love and the freedom of the poetic imagination. The collection brings together the radical anticolonial poems and an African Guyanese man's paens of praise to Indian womanhood of Pray for Rain (1958); the poems of psychic disturbance of Sources of Agony (1979) and many previously unpublished. The language of these poems is marked by a rich fertility of image and a bold heterogeneity of diction, a reflection of the diverse sources of experience from which they grow."Williams's journey from hope to disillusion parallels the experience of many other black people, old and young; but he retails that journey with sensitivity and maturity..." Prabu Guptara, British Book News"'To Alice' and 'Ann Whittaker' deal with love, that most ordinary of miracles, in a way that makes it seem magical... They range from protest to bawdiness with room for celebration somewhere between." Jeffrey Robinson, Kyk-over-Al.Milton Williams was born in Guyana. Part of a group of writers which included Martin Carter and Wilson Harris, he left Guyana in 1960, and lived in Newcastle for many years.

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A few years ago, Kamau Brathwaite described Cyril Dabydeen as 'one of the most confident and accomplished voices in the Caribbean diaspora this side of the late 20th century. Now in the 21st century there is the opportunity to savour the growth and achievement of over thirty years. From his first Canadian publications, Goatsong, Distances, This Planet Earth, Heart's Frame and Elephants Make Good Stepladders from the 1970s and early 80s, to his Canadian publications of the 1990s, Stoning the Wind and Born in Amazonia, not forgetting his two Peepal Tree publications, Islands Lovelier than a Vision and Discussing Columbus, Cyril Dabydeen has selected those poems that best represent the journey he has made across multiple boundaries. From his roots as an Asian whose grandparents migrated as indentured labourers from 19th century India, from his shaping as a Guyanese growing up during a period of intense national ferment, and his life as an adult in Canada, Cyril Dabydeen has shaped a vision that makes an enlightening virtue of heterogeneity. Not merely a Guyanese exile, but a writer who has immersed himself in the landscapes, history and lived experience of Canada (and without losing the insistent promptings of Guyanese memory and concern), Dabydeen's poetry shows the rich possibilities inherent in combining immigrant and diasporic selves. His work ranges across the confessional, the narrative and the mythic but always with an unwavering integrity in seeking the interior truth of the poem. He writes with a conversational directness, a clarity born of careful craft, but with an obliqueness of angle and density of image that constantly shifts the reader into new and rewarding frames of reference.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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There is nothing quite like Gordon Rohlehr’s Musings, Mazes, Muses, Margins in Caribbean writing; probably its nearest neighbours are Kamau Brathwaite’s The Zea Mexican Diary and Trenchtown Rock. Over a period of more than forty years, Rohlehr, supreme public critic of the post-colonial Caribbean, its creative writing and the historian and deep analyser of calypso, has been paying quiet attention to his inner consciousness, a fictive journeying that has much to say about outer personal and wider Caribbean realities. It is a book that ranges over a variety of forms – diary, recorded dreams, poems, a kind of flash fiction, polemics, prophecies, and philosophical reflections -- all enriched by a lifetime of reading, thinking and articulate writing. As befits the slippery connections between inner and outer worlds, Rohlehr’s writing is distinguished by an infectious humour and a delight in puns.In the act of questioning what the years of “wuk” have achieved, Rohlehr asks himself and us the most profound questions – not the unanswerable metaphysics of “What are we here for?” but the material, ethical question of “To what end do we exist?” In the context of a Caribbean of disappointed post-colonial hopes, Rohlehr both confronts an existential void and records the increments of creativity and achievement that offer future hope.The book begins with the Guyanese child, born with a caul over his face, gifted with a prophetic vision deeply immersed in the African being that is part of his inheritance. He records how he was told – beyond his memory – how family members “steamed” his eyes to destroy something embarrassing to a colonial, lower-middle class family. The visions and intuitive knowledge disappeared, but if the family elders believed that they were cauterising something to destruction, they failed utterly to kill the visionary dreamer, the Daniel Lyonnes-Denne, who is one part of the triumvirate that also includes the public Gordon and the reticent Frederick.In his previous books, Gordon Rohlehr confronted the Caribbean world head-on. Here, he approaches from the margins, and who is to say his dream-work doesn’t tell just as powerful truths about Caribbean reality?

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A brave, exciting and adult collection that entertains with wit, shocks with frankness, and engages both intellect and emotion. Richly varied, it ranges from extended stories to intense pieces of flash fiction.Stories may be set in realistic settings – but develop magical narrative twists that make us see all afresh. Others begin in fantasy – returnees from the dead, a man who finds discarded hymens – but are so skilfully realist we can only believe in their actuality.

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In Ascent to Omai time and space are truly elastic, so that events in recent time become part of remote geological time and the boundaries between events and remembering, individual persons and different locations are fluid and permeable. Victor is in search of his father, Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago for burning down the factory he works in. Since then Victor has lost touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana – now the site of one of the largest open-cast goldmines in the world and the site of immense environmental degradation. Prophetically, the clash between the material/technological and the primordial/spiritual is one of the intercutting themes of the novel, connecting to the El Doradean myth so central to the Guyanese imagining.As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past relationship with him and replays his father’s trial, which also becomes his own, in a way that echoes the "Nighttown" episode of Ulysses, though unlike Bloom’s. Victor’s offences are not sexual, but represent blockages in the openness of his thinking. Victor’s search is for spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a true understanding of the world he exists in, though Harris refuses to “impose a false coherency upon material one had to digest” and the reader is invited to share in Victor’s struggling ascent to consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.

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This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK.These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices – from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British – that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.

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The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a major cultural revolution in Caribbean theatre. This new critical study comprises interviews with the key players in this first generation of postcolonial playwrights, few of whom are still alive today. The book touches on their experiences as struggling artists in the Caribbean, along with the changing perceptions of their work, and of the region as a whole.The authors profiled in Visions and Voices are Derek Walcott, Errol Hill, Errol John, Michael Abbensetts, Trevor Rhone, Alwyn Bully, Roderick Walcott, Edgar White, Slade Hopkinson, Lennox Brown, Carmen Tipling, Dennis Scott, Stafford Ashani Harrison and Mustapha Matura. Introduced by Kwame Dawes.Olivier Stephenson is a poet, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. He is a founding member of the Caribbean American Repertory Theatre in New York City and Los Angeles. He lives in Miami.

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Winner of the 2014 Guyana Prize for Fiction, Johnson's Dictionary is set variously in 18th century London and Demerara in British Guiana. It is a celebration of the skills of the enslaved as organisers, story-tellers, artists and mathematicians, hidden in the main from their white masters and mistresses, that is resonant with an undying human urge for freedom.Galley, gallery, gallimaufry: In a novel set in 18th century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), that might be dreamed or remembered by Manu, a revenant from Dabydeen’s epic poem, “Turner”, we meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites and pious Jews – characters who have somehow come alive from engravings by Hogarth and others.Hogarth himself turns up as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world.The transforming power of words is what enlightens Francis when his kindly (or possibly pederastic) master gifts him a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, whilst the idiot savant, known as Mmadboy, reveals the uncanny mathematical skills that enable him to beat Adam Smith to the discovery of the laws of capital accumulation – and teach his fellow slaves their true financial worth. From the dens of sexual specialities where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love (and preach abolition), to the sugar estates of Demerara, Dabydeen’s novel revels in the connections of Empire, Art, Literature and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary and redemptive.David Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1957. He is only the second West Indian writer, following VS Naipaul, to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Turner: New and Selected Poems (Cape, 1994) was republished by Peepal Tree in 2002. His 1999 novel A Harlot's Progress was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His other novels include Disappearance (Peepal Tree, 2005) and Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008). He co-edited the Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), and his documentaries on Guyana have appeared on BBC TV and radio. David is now Professor at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick.

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After long hard years in the Old Brit'n, will Moses Aloetta ever save enough money to realise his dreams of returning to his native Trinidad? Not if those 'damn vagabonds and reprobates', Sir Galahad, Cap and Harris, his so-called friends, have anything to do with it. These seven one act plays bring to dramatic life some of the characters who first appeared in Selvon's classic novels of exile, The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending. Dreams, schemes, summer gaiety and winter disappointments: the experiences of the parents and grandparents of the Black British children of today are portrayed with Selvon's characteristic humour and poignancy. The plays are edited with an introduction and notes by Susheila Nasta.Samuel Selvon was born in San Fernando in 1923. He is the author of eleven novels, set both in Trinidad and London. He lived in London and Canada for many years. He died on a return visit to Trinidad in 1994.

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Aleyah Hassan knows from an early age that some mystery surrounds her grandmother who, except for praying incessantly, spends her days in silence. When Aleyah finally breaks down her mother's reluctance to reveal the family's heart of darkness, she learns that Nani once had a great deal to say, that she was drawn to a vision of revolutionary politics and the desire to speak on behalf of the sugar workers of their village. But in the Guyana of the 1940s, a woman could not play such a role, and Nani was forced to act through her husband, Nazeer. He, lacking his wife's abilities, was destroyed by the villagers' humiliating perception of him as a man ruled by his wife. What has never been clear is the extent to which Nani was directly responsible for his self-destruction. When Aleyah grows up academically gifted and with the desire to change the world, her family is both proud and concerned, particularly by Aleyah's and Nani's mutual attraction. And later, when Aleyah, following a scholarship to England, has to choose between her work for a radical aid agency and her children and marriage to a charming but lightweight fellow Guyanese, family history appears to be repeating itself. In a novel that moves easily between the socially realistic and the poetic, "A Silent Life" combines strong social themes (concerning gender and race) with a narrative that explores mythic patterns through elements of the other-worldly.

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Resistance, recovery and re-creation go to the heart of this novel, which tells the past and present of two generations of Haitians, tied both by relations of blood and by the shedding of it. In the process, Myriam Chancy narrates the bloody history of the last six centuries of Haiti itself, from the violent years of colonialism and slavery, to the chaotic aftermath of the fall of the Baby Doc regime.In a society in which men in blue 'stick a gun to their hips and call it their life', and blood runs like rainwater through the streets, a family is flung apart, to the point of shattering. But it is Josèphe's act of remembrance, of bringing to voice her grandmother, cousins, friends, and her self, that brings down the barriers of place, time, even death, to bring the family together, and to relieve each of the weight of the past they have had to bear. The power of this challenging, multi-layered novel is in its network of narrative voices which set the poetic against the brutal to striking effect. Josèphe is safe but desperately lonely in Canada; her grandmother dies terrified for her family's future; her cousin Alphonse flees to the USA where he hopes to escape the dark shadow cast by his father; and his half-brother Delphi joins the rebels and pays the heaviest price. Josèphe's best friend Desirée also rebels, but finds underground a community with the power to breathe vivid new life into her veins. Within and behind them all stands the amazing figure of Mami Céleste, the mambo who has lived and died four lifetimes and whose tongue can speak the whole history of Haiti, but who is also Delphi's mother, Josèphe's inspiration, Desirée's spiritual saviour, and another victim of the Tonton Macoutes' brutality.Their stories are threaded through with ancestral echoes, historical connections, and the powerful mysteries of voodoo rites, all of which come to us through the enchanting rhythms of Haitian Créole. Myriam Chancy has created a deeply important novel, unique in its exploration of the harsh realities of postcolonial Haiti from a womanist perspective, and remarkable because it does so with such insight, sensitivity and poetry.Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian writer and scholar born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and raised in Quebec City and Winnipeg.

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N.D. Williams' characters - who often address us direct, each in a uniquely distinctive voice - are invariably in motion or grappling with its temptations. They are returning to the Caribbean after long absences abroad, on the verge of leaving to make new lives or struggling to contain the frustrations of island life within their decisions to stay put. Though several of the stories focus with satirical sharpness on the pretensions of 'The Republic' (Guyana in its most self-consciously socialist imposture), Williams' stage is the wider Caribbean diaspora, in the UK, Brooklyn or Toronto: the Caribbean that never leaves his characters' heads. His characters' perspectives are often from the margins, anxious not to be swept away into the anonymous mass, though this stance is not unproblematic: the narrator of 'Batty Bwoy, Divert', for instance, has to deal with the contradictions between his attractions to Rastafarianism and his discomfort, as a gay man, over Rasta homophobia. What Williams's characters want is the space to cultivate their sense of individual worth, though this can sometimes involve becoming trapped in an absurd or confining persona. At the heart of all the stories is the plea for a humane tolerance.N.D. Williams is Guyanese and lives in New York. In 1976 his novel Ikael Torass won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize.

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Heron's Canoe explores the intersections and folds within the history of the collision between the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Focusing on the journey the Yoruba gods made with slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, on resonances with Amerindian myths concerning the scattering of their gods, and on the transformations of each within the creolising, hybridising culture of the Caribbean, Mark De Brito's poem is a highly original meditation on the both the nature of the African diaspora and the nature of history. He makes imaginative use of found text from historical sources, translations of Yoruba prayers and invocations, but there is always a deeply personal tone to these carefully crafted poems.Heron's Canoe is the English translation for the Carib name of a constellation that lies in the region of Ursa Major, significant to Amerindian myths of origin, which Mark De Brito's poem connects to other myths of origin, particularly those of West Africa which reached the Caribbean in the submerged belief systems and religions of the African slaves. De Brito joins that small group of Caribbean poets and novelists whose work explores the existence of a distinctive Caribbean cosmology as the root of a nativist literary aesthetic.De Brito's approach is both personal and intellectual: as a Black British person who has explored his Trinidadian family roots and through them the manifestations of Africa in Trinidad in the Orisha chapelles, but also as a writer inspired by the work of Wilson Harris in his emphasis on the importance of the broken and buried legacies of the Caribbean.Mark De Brito was born and lives in the UK. His family originated in Trinidad.

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When E.A. Markham writes a story about the Other World Cup (Montserrat loses 4-0 to Bhutan - the volcanic eruption has destroyed all the football pitches in Montserrat) and a few months later is actually invited to a literature festival in Bhutan, this chimes in with his fiction. In 1972, his alter ego, Pewter Stapleton, invented the island of St Caesare (next door to Montserrat, but more independent-minded) as part of an elaborate scam to enjoy the rich perks of a UN conference. Since then, the island has been pencilled in on a couple of maps; and a handful of people claim to have been there.Nothing is straightforward in Markham's fictive world. His stories constantly deny conventional expectations and make us rethink both how we interpret experience and what we expect of fiction.Conventional narrative could never convey the complexities of the recurrent and entertaining cast of mainly Caribbean characters as they make sense of their remembered and reinvented lives. Digression becomes an art form both in Pewter Stapleton's narration and in their stories. It is the rich web of words they weave that leads Markham to his image of the drawing room as a repository of the talk of family and friends as perhaps the most valuable possession taken by Caribbean people through Customs.This collection brings together new and uncollected stories and selections from E.A. Markham's two previous collections, Something Unusual (1984) and Ten Stories (1992). Each of the stories has its own crafted completeness, whether in the observant humour of 'The Pig Was Mine', the bleakness of 'Skeletons', the audacious mythologizing of 'A Short History of St. Cesaire', or the absurdist magical realism of 'Digging.' They confirm him as one of the most original users of the short story form in both British and Caribbean fiction.E.A. (Archie) Markham died unexpectedly in Paris on 23rd March, Easter day. Born in Montserrat in 1939, E.A. Markham worked in the theatre, in the media and as a literary editor.

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David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner's celebrated painting 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying'. Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting.Turner was described Caryl Phillips as "a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited", and by Hanif Kureishi as "Magnificent, vivid and original."In addition to the title poems, Turner contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey.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.

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