In this award-winning collection of stories, Sasenarine Persaud presents us once more with his unique vision of lives North American and Caribbean. Here are voices probing at differences which are and aren't; all threaded together by the ancestral India of the protagonists' imagination, the Caribbean of their childhood, the Toronto or New York of their recent years, presented in a style sipired by an ancient tradition in which storytellers move easily in and out of stories and time and history.

Sasenarine Persaud's profile page

Sasenarine Persaud is the author of five books, including the novels The Ghost of Bellow's Man (1992) and Dear Death (1989), and a book of poetry, A Surf of Sparrows' Songs (1996). He is the recipient of the K M Hunter Foundation's Emerging Artist Award for the stories in this collection, and also a Caribbean Heritage Award (1998) for "outstanding achievements as an author, poet, and literary theorist." His work has appeared in publications in Canada, England, India, the Middle East, the United States and the West Indies. One of the stories published here appeared in the 1997 Journey Prize Anthology and was a contender for the 1997 Journey Prize. That story was also selected for The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. Persaud was born in Guyana and has lived in Canada and Florida for several years.

"Persaud's breathtaking narrative demonstrates its strong affinity with the work of Austin Clark. Here, almost inscrutable demotic slang, once penetrated, reinforces Persaud's social commentary and nimbly pits self-ironizing postmodernism against the timeless values of narrative." - The Globe and Mail