The final instalment in a quartet of novels exploring the lives of the small St Lucian middle class in the years around independence. Peter Breville, after years abroad, has resumed his marriage with his long abandoned wife Phyllis (the subject of Another Country), and is now working as a lecturer in Jamaica. His brother Paul remains in St Lucia, disgraced and sacked from professional employment by his refusal to marry his pregnant girlfriend. His apparent descent into madness begs the question: is this his contrived mask or a
serious breakdown?
There is no Caribbean novelist with greater economy or elegance who exposes the realities behind the masks people wear or the gaps between postcolonial rhetoric and the actuality of minds that remain deeply colonised. Though first published in 1972, Garth St Omer’s novel has lost none of its uncomfortable truth-telling power.