Salt: A Novel

Set in Trinidad, the story is launched by the mythical tale of Guinea John, an ancestor of Blackpeople, who put two corn cobs under his arm pits and flew from a clifftop, away from the scene of his enslavement, back to Africa. His descendants have eaten salt, grown too heavy to fly, and cannot follow him. They are left to wrestle with their future on the island. Now, more than one hundred years after "Emancipation", like all the people who share the island - Asians, Africans, and Europeans - they need to be weaned from old captivities and welcomed into the New World. Addressing the challenge of this liberating welcome are Alford George, schoolteacher turned politician; Bango Durity, laborer and activist; and a swirl of unforgettable men and women - minor characters of major proportions - telling their stories in their own voices; all striving with passion and wit to make sense of their lives in the still-young country where the roles of enslaved and landowner still linger, but "the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom".

Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize, this rich and masterly novel follows the progress of a national liberation campaign of sorts -- a welcoming of the diverse population of Trinidad to the New World nearly one hundred years after Emancipation. Afford George, a teacher turned politician, and Bango Durity, a worker-activist, lead the way. Salt is narrated in lyrical voices, "in a generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity -- of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike -- within its rushing energy" (New York Times Book Review).