When the infant Jordon Sant is taken to the St Asteria Home for Children after the murder of his parents, he sets out on a journey that is a constant struggle between his best and worst selves. One relationship, with the young nun the children call Mouse, awakens the possibilities of love and hope, but when Mouse abandons her calling and leaves the home, the world thereafter becomes a darker place. Barely a teenager, he runs away from the home to scuffle for a living in the frightening underbelly of Port of Spain. There Jordon reaches the lower depths of both Trinidadian society and himself.
In Jordon Sant, Kevin Jared Hosein creates a narrator who gets under your skin. He takes us into the most dreadful places of human experience, confesses doing seemingly unforgivable things. But though Jordan knows how inescapable circumstance can be, he never denies responsibility for his actions. But can this Dostoyevskian figure save himself?
The Repenters takes us to places in Trinidad readers will not have been before. In Kevin Hosein the Caribbean announces a writer whose work is poetic, Gothic, and deeply transgressive, whose creation of a voice for Jordon Sant is troubling, engrossing and not to be forgotten.
Kevin Jared Hosein won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He was previously shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Prize and is featured in the 2014 anthology Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean. His debut book Littletown Secrets was published in 2013.