As colourful as the country of which she writes, Trinidad and Tobago; as lusty as her protagonist, Celia, a girl who cannot see how she attracts men and suffers for the sex appeal she exudes. There is a lyrical lilt to the prose that sings through as Celia tries to make a life for herself. A lovely book.
Celia’s mother died bringing her into the world — when one soul flies in, another flies out, her aunt Tassi says. So she lives in Black Rock, Tobago, with her cousins and Tassi’s second husband Roman, a man so low he could crawl under a snake’s belly on stilts. Celia thinks he’s the devil, and one day he does something to prove her right, so she runs away to Trinidad and a new life in service.
A lyrically beautiful story, Amanda Smyth’s writing matches the lushness of the vivid tropical landscape. Black Rock is tinged with a sense of the supernatural.
'Amanda Smyth writes like a descendant of Jean Rhys. Black Rock is a powerful cocktail of heat and beautiful coolness, written in a heady, mesmerising yet translucent prose which marks Smyth out as a born novelist’ Ali Smith
Author
About Amanda Smyth
Amanda Smyth is Irish/Trinidadian. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 2000. Her short stories have been published in New Writing, London Magazine, and broadcast on Radio 4 as part of a series called Love and Loss. Amanda was awarded an Arts Council Grant for her first novel, Black Rock.
