Peter Ducksworth, a Trinidadian widower of English ancestry, retires to Barbados, believing he will find an earthly paradise there. He decides to divide his land among his three daughters while he is alive, his intention not unlike that of King Lear's who hoped, "That future strife / May be prevented now." But Lear made the fatal mistake of confusing flattery with love, and so does Ducksworth. Feeling snubbed by his youngest daughter, Ducksworth decides that only after he dies will she receive her portion of the land. In the meantime, he gives his two older daughters their portions, ironically setting in motion the very strife he hoped to prevent. Beautifully written in elegant prose, this is a novel about greed, resentment, jealousy, betrayal, and romantic love, through which Nunez weaves themes of racism and classism in the postcolonial world of the Caribbean, giving us a diverse cast of characters of African, Indian, Chinese, Syrian/Lebanese, and English ancestry.
Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the 'sterner stuff' of her parents' ambitions for their children and her mother's seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by the oppressive strictures of colonialism, by the Catholic Church's prohibition of artificial birth control (which her mother obeys, terrified by the threat of eternal damnation), and by what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the 'privilege of skin color' in his mother's Caribbean island homeland where 'the brown-skinned classes...came to fetishize their lightness.'
Earphones Award winner. "Self-effacing and honest, Nunez gives listeners a unique window onto a foreign world." - AudioFile Magazine
Peter Gardner, a white scientist from England, is exiled after performing dangerous experiments on patients. He flees with his beautiful young daughter, Virginia, to the Caribbean, where he raises her in isolation among few people—all natives. One of those natives is Carlos, a young boy of mixed-race. Virginia and Carlos develop a forbidden friendship, which later blooms into a love that binds them above all cultural, racial, and paternal resistance. This is a touching love story and a haunting coming-of-age tale.
“[It has] strong themes and dramatic ironies…readers will find her love story—which has a refreshingly happy ending—very sensitively told.”--Publishers Weekly
Trinidad-born Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated literature professor whose focus on the works of "Dead White Men" receives little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, is no longer certain about their life together. Once a poet, now a teacher and nearly forty, Harlem-born Sally wants something more. If Sally and Justin's union is to survive (along with four-year-old daughter Giselle), both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.
"A perceptive and moving tale of an African American middle-class marriage struggling to right itself amid tremors of self-discovery...Nunez allows the narrative to unfold with understated elegance."--Publishers Weekly