Books

Photograph - William Hearle

Looking for Cazabon

For his first poetry collection, Lawrence Scott, the award-winning Trinidadian novelist returns in his reflections to the watercolours and the sites of the 19th-century Trinidadian artist Michel Jean Cazabon, the subject of his novel, Light Falling on Bamboo. Beautifully crafted, these highly regarded poems, mostly sonnets, celebrate the landscape of Trinidad and revisit loves and friendships while evoking both the historical and contemporary violence of its society.

Dangerous Freedom

London in 1802 is a dangerous place for black people. Elizabeth d’Aviniere, the mixed race great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice, has spent her childhood as Dido Belle in his London home. Now as an adult, she reflects on her childhood and fears for her own children’s safety. Above all, she yearns for her mother, an African-born enslaved woman. Why did she not write? Had she been recaptured?

Balai de Sorciére

Balai de sorcière retrace l’histoire de la malédiction coloniale d’une île des Caraïbes. Le roman raconte les traversées, dévoile mémoires et archives, chemine entre grandeurs, misères et mythes. Puisant dans la tradition du carnaval, Lawrence Scott brouille les pistes, renverse perspectives et hiérarchies. Le dernier représentant de la dynastie des Monagas de los Macajuelos, Lavren, merveilleux conteur, « lévite entre les siècles, les races, les genres, dans les interstices du temps, à l’écoute du désir des femmes et du silence des hommes ».

Witchbroom - 25th Anniversary of Publication

A Caribbean Creole family saga as told by its last surviving member, a hermaphrodite whose memory and imagination uncover multi-layered encounters, from the colonial birth of the New World to the 20th century, The novel – fantastical, sensuous and enchanting – is a sumptuous reckoning of the nightmares and passions of Caribbean history amid the "hysteria of parrots" and the witchbroom parasite that kills the family’s cocoa plantations.

Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater

This new collection of short stories from an award-winning writer explores a Caribbean world of yearnings and memory, of departure and return, underpinned by the disturbing tensions created by religion, race, sexuality and crime. Sensuous and evocative, Scott's prose has a lightness of touch and tone that exhilarates and illuminates. More daring than his earlier collection Ballad for the New World, Scott weaves the sacred, erotic and profane with playful satire and irony. In the midst of everyday lives, he finds the extraordinary in the ordinary

Light Falling on Bamboo

Trinidad, 1848. Michel Jean Cazabon returns home to be at his beloved mother's deathbed. Life on the island seems very different after the freedoms of post-Revolutionary Paris, where his paintings have hung in the Louvre. Domestic tensions and haunting reminders of the past threaten his equanimity. Despite the Emancipation Act, his childhood home is still in the grip of colonial power, its people riven by the legacy of slavery. Michel Jean finds himself caught between the powerful and the dispossessed.

Witchbroom

A curious narrator called Lavren, both male and female, tells carnival tales of crime and passion. These tales evoke a visionary history of the Monagas family and their island.

Witchbroom is a brilliant first novel which reveals the history of a Caribbean island with an intensity and originality that is unrivalled.

Ballad for the New World

Including the prize-winning story The House of Funerals

Tales of thwarted desires, repressed passions and betrayals evoke a troubled Caribbean paradise. The legacy of a cruel history haunts this new world society. Individuals are consumed by their own emotions and confused by the shifting ground of their own cultures.

Aelred's Sin

News of his brother’s death brings Robert de la Borde from the Caribbean to England. Reading through Jean Marc’s old journals, Robert is intrigued by what he finds. He attempts to piece together the fragments of his brothers’ troubled life.

Moving from present to past, from cruelty to sympathy, Aelred’s Sin is a powerful novel of erotic love, spiritual awakening and, above all reconciliation.

Night Calypso / Calypso De Nuit

1938 is a tumultuous year on the small Trinidadian island of El Caracol, which houses a leper colony and a convent. In the sultry heat of the dry season a young orphan, Theo, is sent to live with the island’s doctor, Vincent Metivier. The doctor knows little of Theo’s past, only that it has been troubled and that he now needs love and attention.

As Theo settles into the rhythm of life in El Caracol, he begins to unburden himself of his demons. Every night, he sleeptalks his own strange, disturbing calypso about his childhood. Vincent listens and, gradually, learns what demons still haunt the boy’s mind. And as his friendship with the passionate, unpredictable nurse Sister Weil intensifies, Vincent finds his settled life spiralling dangerously out of control, as war in Europe looms on the horizon.

English Version

French Version

Golconda - Our Voices, Our lives

Golconda is the name of a former fortress on the Deccan plateau in India. It was also the name given in the 19th Century to a rich tract of land in the Naparimas of Southern Trinidad which was once a sugar-cane estate.

Some 200 years after it's first mention in the historical records of Trinidad and Tobago, Golconda is now an extended village, rich in the memories of a complex and sometimes disturbing past.

The writings which appear in this collection have grown out of a community, oral history project, in association with The Acadamy at UTT for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs.

In this imaginative, textured collection, past and present residents of Golconda recall life as it existed on the estate and it's environs. Captured in their own often poetic dialect, Golconda: Our Voices, Our Lives is a vivd recreation of an era now gone and a tribute to the indomitable spirit and purpose of a community.

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