Jumping Ship and Other Stories
A collection of stories set in Trinidad introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters, ranging from a pair of hapless tourists at a witchcraft ceremony to a hunch-backed shoemaker feuding with a one-armed butcher.
A Fling With a Demon Lover
by Kelvin Christopher James
from Harpercollins
The central character of Secrets, Kelvin James' first novel, was young, shy, and naive. Sassela Jack, better known as "Sass," is anything but. A New York schoolteacher, she walks out on her live-in boyfriend and heads for Greece, where she takes up with a much-younger paramour named Ciam. Theirs is a relationship of equals. Sass has no illusions about the nature of their attraction. But as Ciam becomes more confrontational, Sass begins to withdraw, leaving the reader to wonder about the nature of his mysterious behavior and the source of her wild mood swings.
Sassela is tired of her fourth-grade students, tired of her mundane life and particularly tired of living with a man she no longer loves. When she meets Ciam, with his lilting accent and a smile that reflects his native Caribbean sunshine, he seems like a balmy breeze in her otherwise cold life. Fifteen years her junior, the free-spirited Ciam is a welcome flirtation until he unexpectedly shows up on her trip to Greece. There they meet a strange otherworldly girl, and Sassela soon discovers that her innocent fling has grown dangerously out of control and that a sinister evil lurks deep within her island paradise.
Secrets
The author of Jumping Ship and Other Stories recounts the story of Uxann, a shy country girl in Trinidad, whose sheltered existence will be destroyed by the rites of passage into womanhood. A first novel. Tour.
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