Mona remembers all too clearly the night of the big row in the house on Manahambre Road, back in her native island of Trinidad, when Da-Da, in a drunken rage, seemed ready to kill her nine-year-old brother, Kello. Grown up now, and living in Montreal, Mona wryly perceives herself as the calm at the centre of her family’s storm. She yearns to make sense of her tortured family and the feeling of displacement that haunts her. And as she visits her dying brother, and reacquaints herself with her irrepressible Cousin Bess, Mona realizes that if she is to have a future, she must reconcile the past with the present. A moving story about a young girl’s journey into the secrets of a winding family history, The Swinging Bridge carries us through nineteenth-century India, with its cast-out Brahmin widows, to the cane fields of Trinidad, where impoverished Indians become indentured labourers, to the optimism of the twentieth century, when the island sheds its colonial past and reimagines itself as a new homeland for many cultures. Finally, we arrive in North America, a new continent with old problems, where Mona’s family decides to settle. Steeped in the rhythms and lyrical lilt of Caribbean life, this many-layered tale marks the fiction debut of Ramabai Espinet, a poet and writer with immense talent and an original new voice.
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