Overview

Disaster catapults three children into the care of their Caribbean grandparents, before another relative, elusive and perhaps unstable, makes a conflicting claim to guardianship. Balancing domestic calamity against her own compulsive writing, Aria faces physical and psychological threats, as a pandemic creeps up on the world and the country moves into lockdown. By Such a Parting Light offers a humorous and poignant tale of aging and of coming of age, and it takes a mischievous approach to the multiple meanings of retirement. A must for all readers of Caribbean and island literature - for readers with a taste for realism that blends seamlessly into strains of the marvelous and gothic - the novel’s themes of loss and separation, love and resilience, are universally appealing.  The book personalizes local and international violence and terror by bringing it all home to a small country in an international context of uncontained infection and catastrophic politics. Turning an astonished eye on developed nations from the frail shelter of a tiny island, the tale unveils alternative notions of civilization and enlightenment.

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9789766409388

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Barbara Lalla is Professor Emerita, Language and Literature, the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her many publications include the novels Grounds for Tenure, Uncle Brother, Cascade, and Arch of Fire and the scholarly works Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival, the companion volumes Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole and Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (co-authored with Jean D’Costa), and Caribbean Literary Discourse (co-authored with Jean D’Costa and Velma Pollard).

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