Good Scammer by Guy Kennaway This is the book Horatio Alger would have written if an Alger hero came from a post-colonial Caribbean island awash with foreign money that never seems to trickle down to the poverty-stricken villages beyond gated tourist enclaves. The poorly educated, semi-literate orphan at the heart of Guy Kennaway’s latest novel experiences the ‘Rise to Respectability’, sees his...
Guy Kennaway (Photo by Vanessa Fristedt) Guy Kennaway’s Jamaica is “a little Eden made more interesting by the Fall”. His book One People is a comic novel, but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories he tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. It’s a world populated by wannabe drug dealers, resourceful beach prostitutes and rental dreads who nurse warm...
One People by Guy Kennaway Cousins Cove is a real village, but the stories in Guy Kennaway’s comic novel are fiction, gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat in Jamaica. “If you travel to the parishes of St James, Hanover and Westmoreland,” he writes, “you will not find the characters in these pages, but will find their joy, friendliness, strength and defiance in the people...
I was in Barbados all last week for work. A lot of my time was spent hunched over accounting ledgers. But I did find time for a little snorkeling and island driving. And of course I made the trip back up to the north end of the island to refill my engraved bottle of St. Nicolas Abbey rum! (You can read about my previous rum tasting adventures in Barbados in this blog) My friends at St. Nicholas...
Scenes of natural disaster and human suffering have filled the television screens of the western world for the past week as rich countries band together to offer assistance in the aftermath of one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the Asian tsunami of 2004. I visited the northeast of Haiti in December of 1998. I remember the border checkpoint with the Dominican Republic, its more...