'Each word is a revelation.' The Times

'Earl Lovelace is the real stuff, a proper writer.' James Kelman

In the sleepy village of Kumuca, Trinidad, change happens slowly. Yet to move with the times and expand the horizons of the villagers, the elders elect to build a school and bring in a schoolmaster with great celebration. The warnings of a local priest - that the quest for education will bring more to the village than they expect - are ignored. But the villagers will learn, all too cruelly, that progress can mean the destruction of what they know and love.

Earl Lovelace is a novelist, playwright, and essayist who lives and works in Trinidad and Tobago. Among many honours and positions, he was most recently the Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at the Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999-2005), and his schooling includes the Eastern Caribbean Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, Howard University, and Johns Hopkins University from which he holds the Master of Arts degree. His novels include Salt, which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize, The Dragon Can't Dance (1998), The Wine of Astonishment (1982), The Schoolmaster (1968), and While Gods Are Falling (1965), winner of The British Petroleum Independence Literary Award. His short stories appear in the collection, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988); his selected essays appear in Growing in the Dark (2003); and a film of his story 'Joebell and America' with a screenplay co-authored with his daughter Asha, was produced in September 2004.