Salt

Salt is an extraordinary tour de force by one of the pre-eminent literary presences in the Caribbean, a novel which explores like none before it the intermingling of cultures that is the contemporary West Indian experience.

Ever since Guinea John, with a price on his head for insurrection, put two corn cobs under his armpits and flew from a cliff-top back to Africa, taking with him the secrets of levitation and flight, his descendants, condemned to life on the island, have found that the “New World” has remained out of their grasp. Now comes Alford George, schoolteacher turned politician, who, after nineteen years of teaching his pupils to espcape overseas, is forced to face the question: how to welcome the diverse races of Trinidad to their own island and how to set free a people who, more than a century after “Emancipation”, are still struggling under old captivities?

Salt is a triumphant, vibrant novel peopled by enduring and embattled women and men striving with passion and wit to make sense of the intimacies and the contradictions of their lives in the still young country of Trinidad, where the roles of enslaved and landowner linger, yet where “the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom”.

A new edition of Salt was published by Faber on 20 August 2023 as part of their Caribbean Writers Series.