The True History of Paradise
Margaret Cezair-Thompson1999

Easter, 1981, and Jamaica is in a state of emergency. With violence in the streets and a government about to collapse, the Landing family gathers to bury one of its own. For Monica Landing, the proud, imperious matriarch who had not spoken to her daughter in fifteen years, the death of Lana Landing is the cruelest kind of loss. For Lana's younger sister, Jean, it is a tragedy she cannot comprehend. All she knows is that her beloved homeland, with its blue mountains and exuberant flora, its rich African rhythms and crashing ocean waves, holds no future for her.

But flight means crossing a landscape where soldiers turned executioners and armed gangs rule, where fires rage and unburied bodies lie in the roads. Flight means making her way through the memories that engulf her, with a good and silent man, perhaps the only man she has ever loved, traveling by her side, caught up in his own tormented memories of Jean's beautiful, flamboyant sister.

In this time of apocalypse, past and present merge in Jean's remembrances of childhood; in the guiding visions that have always been with her; in the voices of her ancestors who hail from places as diverse as China, Scotland, and Africa... voices that tell of hardship and struggle, love and survival... voices of both the living and the dead.

Told from a multiplicity of perspectives, The True History of Paradise captures the grace, beauty, and brutality that are indelible parts of the Jamaican experience. The story of three women born into a divided, troubled paradise becomes the history of a country, of generations of wanderers coming together in a place that can neither sustain nor be sustained by them, but that will shape them forever. Epic in scope, scored to a rich, lyrical patois, it is a powerful and moving debut by a gifted new author.

Titre original : The True History of Paradise (1999)