From the WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2014, a 'humorous, bittersweet fiction, combin ing] the fantastical realism of Marquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy' INDEPENDENT

It all begins with the theft of Tessa Walcott's panties...

After the hurricane of 1974, Jamaica is devastated. Imelda Richardson is sent to England, without a place to stay or a plan of what to do. Luckily sheis taken in by Purletta Johnson, a member of the ex-pat bourgeoisie who has decided to become more Jamaican than any Jamaican: sucking her teeth, sporting a gold tooth,...

Exploring the relationship between poetry and song, the pieces in this collection work to define the elemental human struggles of good versus evil andlight against darkness. The poems take different shapesnewly forged dictionary definitions; praise-songs celebrating the Singerman in a Jamaican road gang; and simple narratives of ghosts, bandits, and other night creaturesand present an accomplished and progressive voice from a new generation of Caribbean writers."

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on -...