The thirteen stories in The Tree of Youth have a richly exotic, sensuous allure: the landscape shifts from cosmopolitan Canada to beautiful Barbados. They also explore, with understated brilliance, the elation and defeat men and women everywhere experience when they yearn for love and a better life. Here is an unblinking vision of the sexual exploits of Bajans, young and old, one that restores the redeeming values of children, family, and art.

Robert Sandiford's profile page

Robert Edison Sandiford is the author of Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Stories; two graphic story collections, Attractive Forces and Stray Moonbeams,and the memoir Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle. He is a founding editor of ArtsEtc: The Premier Cultural Guide to Barbados, and has worked as a book publisher and video producer. “Reckoning,? which appears in The Tree of Youth, won Barbados? Governor General's Award for Literary Excellence in 2003.

“Robert Edison Sandiford is a natty, dread philosophe, one whose eyes pierce the soul and whose ears hear the heartbeats of the human condition.Born and raised a Montréalais Bajan Canuck, he combines urbane sophistication and deadpan wit to produce miraculous – soulful – realism.With the panache of Austin Clarke and the passion of a calypsonian, Sandiford articulates truths that become more truthful because they flow from his indignant and indelible intelligence.”

– George Elliott Clarke, Poet and professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto

“Thirteen intriguing short stories form the collection revealing Sandiford’s keen ability to unearth fascinating peculiarities in his characters and what may be seen as ‘ordinary lives.’”

– Groove, March 2006

“Many of the thirteen stories deal primarily with relationships, especially between men and women. Sometimes romantic, sometimes entirely sexual, the relationships read as heartbreakingly real.... It is Sandiford’s ability to slip the reader seamlessly into the psyche of each character that is really a strength.”

– Barbados Advocate, April 2006

“Written with a spare, masculine grace, the stories in The Tree of Youth focus closely on relationships, particularly sexual relationships, that suggest both the texture of lived experience in the Caribbean and the way this is transcended by the universal nature of human desire. In these very readable tales, Sandiford reminds us of that heady mix of pleasure and panic that we often experience as we perform (with spouse or partner or lover) the intricate dance of our own mortality.”

– Mark McWatt, author of Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement

“With his power of words and imagination, Robert Edison Sandiford has produced yet another collection of exciting, wonderfully written short stories. The Tree of Youth is a must read.”

– Carl James, author of Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-cultural Worlds of Student Athletes