Emphasizing the importance of listening to one's "inner voice," this book encourages readers to embrace their God-given gifts and characteristics. It explores the contrast between living a fulfilling life through obedience to this inner guidance versus feeling trapped in a stressful, directionless existence. The author aims to inspire individuals to break free from the constraints of modern life and discover the purpose for which they were created, leading to a more meaningful and joyful existence.
Delores is losing parts of herself, her typing speed, her ability to say ‘hi’ to work colleagues, until she is no longer Delores at all, but bare-footed Queen Mapusa, child of Africa, proud mother of modern civilization. Etheline Elvira Ransom is lying in bed, with a pair of scissors under her behind, waiting to teach her bullying, errant man a lesson. Odetta is a 54-year-old wife and mother talking her way through the day of her secret abortion. The Burning Bush women are smoking cigars and weaving each other’s wild blood-red hair into tight plaits, but the plaits won’t hold: somewhere, the hair says, a Bush woman is dying.In these sometimes strange, funny, tragic and truthful stories, Cherie Jones weaves paths through the joys and suffering of women's lives. The writing occupies an in-between space between the magical and the realistic, exploring the tensions between the African folk wisdom Nanan passes on from the ancestors to her grand-daughter, and the colonised dictums that the mother in 'The Bride' offers her daughter about how a respectable woman lives. (‘Remember how nappy you can look if you let yourself go.’)In his introduction, Kamau Brathwaite describes these stories as ‘poems’ that ‘sally forth to sack Rome’, each as one more strand, one more curl, one more weave of a whole book ‘recovering back our culture’, the whole as ‘one more bottle of omen on the Peepal Tree of the People’.
»Ein kraftvoller und schonungsloser Roman über die dunklen Seiten eines Inselparadieses.« (Bookseller) Baxter’s Beach, Barbados: ein perfektes Paradies, solange niemand an der Oberfläche kratzt. Cherie Jones erzählt in eindringlicher, lyrischer Sprache davon, wie Liebe und Verbrechen die Leben ihrer Figuren über alle Klassenschranken und Hautfarben hinweg auf dramatische Weise verändern. »Jones' Debüt wirft einen genauen Blick auf das Leben der einheimischen Barbadier und der wohlhabenden Leute, die ihre Lebenswelten besetzen.« Publishers Weekly – Ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Krimipreis 2022.
