The Whale House and other stories

A boy is killed on a government minister's orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country's lucrative kidnap business; 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 child; a mother grieving the loss of her breasts and trying to protect her children from the knowledge of her cancer. The stories in this collection range across Trinidad's different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; include the moneyed elite (and the illicit sources of new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge bumps up against the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny. What ties the collection together are not only the characters who thread their way across different stories, and the intensive focus on women's lives, but Sharon Millar's achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic; a keen sense of place and her ability to bring it to the reader's eyes.
If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humour and the possibility of redemption.