This novel beautifully evokes the feeling of the Caribbean and the people who live there. Comparisons in style have been made to Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. We follow the life of Celia who has not had any easy childhood an on escaping her past to go to Trinidad she finds love and passion but heartache too. Descriptive and moving this is a lovely first novel from a new voice.
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.
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