Mr. Lowe lives the simple and happy life of a shopkeeper. A Chinese immigrant to Jamaica in the 1890s, Lowe revels in the lush beauty of his adoptive land. But the past confronts Lowe in everything he does, and so his history reveals itself-the tale of his exile from China, his shipboard adventures, an unwanted pregnancy and the arrangement that was made to avoid scandal. The arrangement placed Lowe in a marriage of convenience with a mysterious widow, Miss Sylvie. Lowe and Sylvie's relationship is complex, vivid, erotic, and full of secrets. Sylvie is a light-skinned black woman who, in the...

It's 1978, and Dale Singleton is becoming alarmed as his friend, Ian Kaysen, is afflicted with a mysterious and seemingly untreatable illness characterized by pneumonia, lesions, and dementia. This novel of the first days of AIDS is viscerally affecting, as it conveys the shocked puzzlement of those troubled by Ian's condition while simultaneously documenting Jamaican society's struggle to accept the dignity of gay love. Dale's world collapses, yet his experience of being gay in a middle-class culture circumscribed by church, family, and compulsory heterosexuality is hauntingly memorable-and...