The Whale House and other stories - Softcover

Sharon Millar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845232496 ISBN 13: 9781845232498

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, 2015

Synopsis

A pathologist is asked to lie about a boy killed on government orders; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament: Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, but so too are the lives of those with private griefs: a woman mourning the still-birth of her baby; a young mother with cancer facing her mortality. Millar's characters come intensely alive at points of crisis, of existential threat.The stories in this collection range wide: across different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; across the moneyed elite (and illicit new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge and the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny. Different locations in Trinidad are brought to the reader through a precise and sensuous mapping of the country's fauna and flora.Characters thread their way through different stories, but what ties the collection together is Sharon Millar's distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for the possibility of redemption.

About this title

Review:

"Women have turmeric eyes, men are too beautiful to die, children dance the cocoa and unborn babies are made born as baby sharks. This book made me catch my breath. It made me shake my head and sigh. The characters barb and the language sings" --Tiphanie Yanique

About the Author:

Sharon Millar is the recipient of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Small Axe Short Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in "Granta Online," the "Manchester Review," and "Small Axe," and was also featured in the anthology "Pepperpot: The Best New Stories from the Caribbean."

About this edition

• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1845232496
• ISBN 13: 9781845232498
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172