The Toronto author Olive Senior's Jamaican birthplace provides the setting for these powerfully engaging stories that span a period of roughly 150 years, from the closing days of slavery in 1838 to the 1980s. The tensions wrought by rapid change and conflicting loyalties are at the heart of these stories, most beautifully evoked in the novella "Arrival of the Snake-Woman". Here a young boy narrates the seminal event of his childhood in the late nineteenth century: the coming of a lonely Indian indentured woman into a mountain village. Senior's stories are leavened with wit and humour and the intricate play with language; her characters emerge as triumphant examples of the human spirit unravelling the complex weave of race, class, and cultural and ethnic identity.

First Canadian Edition

"Arrival of the Snake-Woman contains some of Olive Senior's masterpieces. A new edition is a caus for celebration." - H Nigel Thomas, from the Afterword

"Arrival of the Snake-Woman has consilidated (Olive Senior's) reputation as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction and as one of the Caribbeans finest creative minds." - Caribbean Week

The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.

She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

Victor D. Questel established himself as one of the finest new Caribbean poets in the 1970s with three collections, all published in his native Trinidad: Score (1972) published jointly with his friend Anson Gonzalez, Near Mourning Ground (1979) and his posthumous Hard Stares (1982). Sadly, Victor Questel died too young at 33 in 1982 and who knows how his writing would have further developed. What is evident is that his poetry developed rapidly in the ten years between first and last publications, and that he left many fine poems that continue to speak to the present."

In Africa, a man recounts his days within the grinding machinery of the slave trade. Though spared manacles and a hellish ocean crossing by assisting in the degrading business, he is forced finally to confront an inescapable, vicious paradox - in the eyes of both his masters and his own people, he is a pariah. In America, Rudi Williams serves life imprisonment in a Southern jail, brutalised by his guards and isolated from his fellow inmates. Through his letters he writes home to explain himself, and to educate his family in the radical politics of the emerging Black Movement, we come to know a young man whose refusal to bow to the system not only upholds the remnants of his dignity but also seals his fate. In Europe, where the wounds of war are still open, a woman finds that she cannot, after all, to escape the ghetto. For in England, as formerly in Poland, the world outside is hostile, while inside, in her heart, her life is one of stifling fear and dreadful seclusion.

This story takes place on an island with the familiar characters, issues and sights of Caribbean life. At the centre of this world are the Weavers, a mixed-race, middle-class family, and the Mayers family, whose ancestors, the Pindars, tried to uphold tradition, only to discover that love transcends even tradition. Eve, the Weavers' house help who is from a nearby village, is a calm witness to the dramas which are unfolding between these two families drawn together by a series of strange circumstances. With the help of Alexander and Ranee, pioneers of their religious faith, everyone pulls through the difficulties they face as a result, and manages to resolve many issues, maintain family ties, preserve friendships, forge new friendships and grow spiritually into stronger, better human beings. They remind us of some of the mistakes that we have made in our lives as a result of making uninformed or wrong choices. We cannot help but read between the lines that to err is human, and to forgive, divine. 'Lizards Under the Roof' is a novel stating and proving that people from different cultures, races, religions, nationalities and social standing can live together in harmony, once the spiritual impulse brings the understanding that we have more in common than what divides us. The greatest gift of God, our soul, bestowed at conception, is what all of us share and this makes us equal. The innumerable prejudices dividing us are all man-made. God desires only that we live in unity and peace, showing forth love to all of His creation. This story involves individuals and families living and interacting on an island in the Caribbean, bringing out the changes in the way of life under the impact of history, roughly spanning a period from just before World War One to the early Nineties.

It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival-until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.

Nothing's Mat is told by a black British teenager - "every black girl" - for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called "Princess" by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s London-based Princess is allowed to complete her sixth-form final exams by writing a long paper on the West Indian family instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a godsend and that all she has to do is to interview her parents. Her father tries to help her with his side but they both find that their kin will not fit into the standard anthropological template. Her father thinks it a good time for her to go to Jamaica and meet her grandparents, who can better help her with her study.

In Jamaica, much as her middle-class black Jamaican grandparents and her parents in England might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure cousin Nothing, called Conut. Conut introduces Princess to a plant that obeys certain divine principles and is available to humans to make artefacts for their comfort. Accordingly, they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it.

Her studies and subsequent academic career take her to London University and then back to Jamaica, but under-stimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study from high school and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into myriad histories of young Englishmen in Jamaica, of Jamaican women in Panama, and of African Americans in Virginia, among others.

This work is at once a fictional family history and a comment on anthropological methodology and African systems of thought.

Written in vivid, colourful detail, these rich, compelling stories recreate with sensitivity and wit a whole range of emotions, from childhood hope to brooding melancholy.

The Fiction of Robert Antoni: Writing in the Estuary is the first full-length study of the work of this important Trinidadian/ Bahamian Caribbean writer. When his first novel, Divina Trace, appeared in 1992, one critic compared it to a collaboration between James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez. But Antoni's fiction is startlingly original. Each of his subsequent books is quite different from the one before, but all have their common origin in generations of experience in the West Indies, much of which was passed down to Antoni through a rich family tradition of storytelling. The novels are marked as well by Antoni's almost unique ability to navigate both the headwaters and tributaries of Caribbean folk tale and the limitless oceans of modernist and postmodernist texts. Taken together, Antoni's work postulates and embodies a Caribbean sensibility that is estuarial: almost every paragraph displays the multiple tributaries that form Caribbean culture, as well as the impulse to mix, mingle and reach out to the wider world, like a river flowing into the sea.

Patteson places Antoni's work in the multiple contexts of Caribbean storytelling, twentieth-century literature and contemporary Caribbean fiction, then explores each of his innovative and complex texts. In these diverse narratives Patteson finds reflections on the nature of human consciousness and its relationship to language, culture and storytelling itself, as well as sharp insight into the region and its tormented history. This book confirms Antoni's relevance to the literature of the Caribbean and the world.