Trinidad, 1848. Michel Jean Cazabon returns home from France to his beloved mother's deathbed. Despite the Emancipation Act, his childhood home is in the grip of colonial power, its people riven by the legacy of slavery. Michel Jean finds himself caught between the powerful and the dispossessed. As an artist, he enjoys the governor's patronage, painting for him the island's vistas and its women; as a Trinidadian he shares easy wisdom and nips of rum with the local boat-builders. But domestic tensions and haunting reminders of the past abound. His fiery half-sister Josie - the daughter of a slave - still provokes in him a youthful passion; his flirtatious muse Augusta tempts him as he paints her 'for posterity'. Meanwhile, letters from his white, French wife and children remind him of their imminent arrival on the island.

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD1938 is a tumultuous year on the small Trinidadian island of El Caracol, which houses a leper colony and a convent. In the sultry heat of the dry season a young orphan, Theo, is sent to live with the island's doctor, Vincent Metivier. The doctor knows little of Theo's past, only that it has been troubled and that he now needs love and attention.As Theo settles into the rhythm of life in El Caracol, he begins to unburden himself of his demons. Every night, he sleeptalks his own strange, disturbing calypso about his childhood. Vincent listens and, gradually, learns what demons still haunt the boy's mind. And as his friendship with the passionate, unpredictable nurse Sister Weil intensifies, Vincent finds his settled life spirally dangerously out of control, as war in Europe looms on the horizon.A richly sensual, heartfelt novel, Night Calypso is the work of one of the world's most...

Robert de la Borde comes to England in the 1980s from the Caribbean after hearing that his brother, Jean Marc, has died. In Bristol, his brothers journals prompt Robert to visit Ashton Park Monastery, which Jean Marc entered in the 1960s as Brother Aelred.There, with the help of his brothers monastic friend Benedict, Robert pieces together Jean Marcs life; his exuberance, his mental suffering, and his struggle to balance his sexual impulses with his love of God, as set out in the work of Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, against the austerity of Catholic sexual morality. In his understanding, Robert also learns what connects Jean Marc to Jordan, the African slave-boy captive at Ashton Park during the eighteenth century.As Robert is forced to question his inherited prejudices and to confront another ghost of Jean Marcs childhood - the events concerning Ted Salter - what unfolds is a story about the triumph of compassion over brutality. Moving from present to past, from...