Translated from French by Rachel McGill “There was no moon, no stars. The light has been drained away, the sky left mute. I could distinguish neither colours nor shapes. Dunes and trees had been engulfed by the universe, sucked into its sidereal blackness. … I welcomed the obscurity; a gift from nature. It would make …
Continue reading The Desert and the Drum: Mbarek Ould Beyrouk
This is a thoroughly enjoyable whodunit from a Grenadian writer. Michael Digson (“Digger”) is out of work, living on the island of Camaho.[1] He is the illegitimate son (“outside child”) of a maid and her employer, the Commissioner of Police. Digger is haunted by the death of his mother, who was shot during a demonstration …
“It was a cool evening in late summer, when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.” Wallace is a young, gay, Black man who is four years into a degree in biochemistry at a predominantly white Midwestern university—the only Black man in his …
The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house still harbours the spirits of its …
Continue reading The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
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