This novel, loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, focuses on the life of an upper middle class family in modern day Trinidad.

The island, independent since 1962, still struggles with its multiethnic and multicultural complexities, and is fraught with corruption and violence. The heroine, Mrs. B (Marie Elena Butcher), is fast approaching 50. In her mid-life she is forced to admit that neither Ruthie, her daughter, nor her marriage to Charles Butcher, has met her expectations of being both a mother and a wife. Haunted by an affair with her husband's best friend, above all Mrs. B knows that she has disappointed herself.
Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's life is based on longing for what can never be realized and by an inability to adapt to the pressures of her own bourgeois society.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published various academic titles and her first collection of short stories was published in 2007.

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Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw was born in Trinidad and is Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. Her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was published in 2007 and translated into Italian and French. Her first novel, Mrs. B was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014. Mrs B, was shortlisted for the "Best Book Fiction" in The Guyana Prize for Literature Award for 2014. Walcott-Hackshaw presently lives in the Santa Cruz Valley with her family; she has recently completed another collection of short stories and is working on a book of essays on trauma in Caribbean fiction.

Her daughter Ruthie's easy ascent through school and university has been Mrs. B's pride and joy for some time. But as the novel begins, she and her husband Charles are on their way to the airport to collect Ruthie, who has disgraced herself with a married man and a suicide attempt, and is, as they will soon discover, pregnant. Loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the novel focuses on the life of an upper-middle-class family in a contemporary Trinidad that is turbulent with violence and popular dissatisfactions, in response to which the family have retreated to a gated community. Mrs. B (she hates the name of Butcher) is fast approaching 50, and Ruthie's return and the state of her marriage provoke her to some unaccustomed self-reflection. Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's longings are diffuse but bounded by the assumptions of her social circle. And without ever losing sympathy for Mrs. B and her family, the novel asks some tough questions about what resources Mrs. B. can bring to her "issues" and how she can find meaning in her life. And what of Ruthie? Can her greater openness to the island challenge her easy acceptance of privilege? Behind both women is the complex and fascinating figure of Aunt Claire, the family's reader, who has provided the only real nurture in Mrs. B's life. Can she do the same for Ruthie? But, then, how far does her deep immersion in books really equip her for 21st-century Trinidadian life?