The lyrical yet unsentimental stories in this collection offer a portrait of the postcolonial experience of Guyanese citizens. Four decades of history, from the 1960s to the present, are covered through the experiences of the different characters, including Harold, who celebrates the triumph of his Indian-supported political party; Chuni, who encounters the revolutionary rise of a new black middle class; and Sylvia, who confronts her Guyanese roots during an exile in England. A sensitivity to psychological undertones and a poetic sense of the Guyanese worldview allow these stories to resonate with the metaphysical and mundane transformations of the characters.

Jane Lowe Shinebourne's latest novel.

Pairing Caribbean wounds with the grievances of political Islam, this intriguing novel begins as a sad story of unrequited love on a Guyanese sugar estate that descends into the obsessive world of stalking and the temptations of Jihad. Told through the eyes of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the story opens with his boyhood memory of falling from a tree and being badly injured, after which he develops a compelling attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong, who lives on the same sugar estate. Now, years later, Aziz is a highly paid engineer in the Canadian nuclear industry. Although he has a new and prosperous life, he still nurtures racial resentments about the way he was treated as a child and has become a supporter of radical Islam. He also begins to fixate again on Alice and tracks her down. He finds that she is divorced and living in England and asks her to marry him.

When she takes up a job as a reporter in Georgetown, Guyana, Sandra Yansen must leave the close ties of family and village behind. The city she finds is riven by racial conflict and political turbulence.