Around three decades ago, I attended West Country rodeos, which were held in the months of July and August, in the capacity of an RSPCA Inspector. I had acquired a love of horses in my youth, and had spent all available free time at my local riding school. Therefore, this proclivity towards horses, made me an eager candidate for a position in the Society. I was accepted as an RSPCA Inspector in the year 1979. During my seventeen years employment with said Society, I excelled particularly w...

Two gay men with a lifetime of secrets face their insular, homophobic island’s rancour.Growing up in neighbouring villages on the tiny island nation of St Vincent, teenage best friends Gordon and Allen are secret lovers until they are forced apart their community’s traditional expectations and their fear of how others will react. They each complete their university studies abroad, encountering worlds where there is less hostility toward LGBTQ+ people. Tempted to st...

Surely nobody who had suffered the ferocity of the Nazi invasion could consider switching sides and joining the Germans? Yet that is exactly what up to 400,000 Soviet citizens did in World War II.These included not only the 'legions' recruited from non-Russian ethnic groups eager for freedom from Stalin's dictatorship, but also some 100,000 Russians and Cossacks. What began as small local security units of 'Ostruppen', enrolled for the ongoing campaigns against Sov...

A coming-of-age novel set in a Montreal in which immigrant youth totter on the edge of self-destruction and oblivion, in the face of brutal and racist police, an insensitive education system, and few prospects for the future. Thomas’s language is spare, and his crackling dialogue and use of patois can compare with the best in Caribbean literature.“. . . a hard story, sometimes despairingly bleak, but it is also undeniably beautiful . . . worth reading—and rereading . . .”—Qu...

**A Caribbean minister grapples with faith, identity, and forbidden desires.**Millington, a former Methodist minister, seeks a fresh start in Montreal, but his past and hidden desires follow him. As he navigates immigration and a strained marriage, he confronts his sexuality and the psychological trauma that haunts him.Will Millington find peace, or will the secrets he carries consume him? Easily Fooled explores the complexities of identity, the weight of cultural expectat...

The past sits uneasily on the characters of these stories, whether on their native Isabella Island or in Montreal, where some of them now live. Life is ultimately lived according to the choices that were made, and retribution does not always go where it belongs. Thus, Robertson, taking action against his wife and her lover, creates a situation he’s not quite prepared for. The wealthy and proper Higginsons have lived a lie that eventually must come out. Jen and Edwin are passionately in lov...

No Safeguards, the first book in a trilogy, follows Jay's life from age six to twenty-six - and to a lesser extent that of his brother Paul. We witness the destructive impact of fundamentalist Christian beliefs on his mother and father, opposition to those beliefs by the boys' grandmother and each boy's very different response to their parents' religiosity. This is especially poignant after they leave their grandmother's comfortable home in St Vincent to join their mother in Montreal. The ...

Meet Mary Fellows, a sex-worker organizing a demonstration on St Catherine Street; how can she make the Anglican dean support it? . . . Disappointment follows disappointment as Margaret tries to find a suitable man; her latest folly is the suave younger man she brought over from Jamaica; . . . Greta, a domestic help, proudly holds up her son’s high school diploma; but can he read it? . . .These stories from Montreal present a gallery of characters, Caribbean immigrants desperate an...

The Voyage is a collection of poems culled from a lifetime of meditations on self, family, time, and ageing; it also reflects on political and social aspects of human lives, such as hubris, abuse of power, racism and oppression.“Vivid in detail, vibrating with emotion and outrage, The Voyage travels deep into the past to unleash the burdens of history and expose its corroded foundations. With brutal honesty and exquisite musicality, the poems deliver memoirs of a Caribbean childhoo...

In this volume, African Canadian novelists and poets discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists; i.e., they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology, and adhere to the notion that their books must delight and instruct. These interviews, therefore, are valuable additions to the creative process of the individual writers. Apart from identifying h...

When at age 51, Joshua Éclair—victim of a pygmalianism gone awry—emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this pass. This is the gripping story of a man’s search for sanity set in the fictional Caribbean Isabella Island and the various places Joshua has fled to: Montreal, New York, Tallahassee, London, Paris and Madrid.This is a finely accomplished ...

Though the 'Wehrmachtsgefolge' (Armed Forces Auxiliaries) were generally inferior to their armed forces equivalents, their contribution to the German war-effort was far from negligible.Auxiliaries including the NSKK, Transportkorps Speer, Reichsarbeitsdienst and Organization Todt supported the Wehrmacht in their duties. In 1944, the strength of these organizations peaked at 3,800,000-40% of the size of the armed forces. As they became increasingly aware of their im...