"Eugene Coard is woken one morning by a phone call to report the murder of a former St. Lucian friend. It throws him back to memories of their island days, and his complicated love life in London that made necessary his relocation to the USA. Thoughts about his friend's metamorphosis from middle-class "CB" to criminal, ghetto-dwelling "Red" provoke Eugene to review his own so far profitable transformations. But just how much of Eugene's story can we believe? His confessions reveal him as probably the most unreliable and devious narrator in Caribbean fiction; has he, as a writer and psychiatris... continue
As Stephenson, who almost accidentally finds himself as a mature student at university, comes closer to his girl-friend Thea, with her easy talk of her family, he has to acknowledge that he has never known his father, not lived with his mother, and cannot remember what his grandparents looked like. He knows, too, that his failure to come clean about a disreputable episode in his past threatens their relationship. The Lights on the Hill, the first of two interdependent short novels in Shades of Grey, is a moving and inward portrait of a man trying in his halting way to construct his own story. ... continue