Witchbroom
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£10.99
9780993108686
2017
Paperback
Yes
Fiction
Rare and magical. The first of its kind… wonderful evocative language; complete emotional range; a loving, touching insight into human and family relationships.
– Sam Selvon
BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, 1993
Shortlisted | Best First Book
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About
“A really accomplished writer. Lawrence Scott’s book is a delight,” says Nobel prize-winner Derek Walcott of this daring collection of short stories by the award-winning Trinidadian author Lawrence Scott.
These sensuous stories explore a Caribbean world of yearnings and memory, of escape and return underpinned by the disturbing tensions wrought by religion, race, sexuality and crime.
Author
Lawrence Scott is an award-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. His first novel Witchbroom (1992, and reissued by Papillote Press in 2017) was a BBC Book at Bedtime, while his second novel, Aelred’s Sin, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book for Canada and the Caribbean in 1999. He is the winner of the Tom-Gallon Trust short-story award. ‘Light Falling on Bamboo’ (2012) received an honourable mention from Casa de las Americas prize, Cuba, 2014; longlisted for the International Impac Dublin literary award, 2014; shortlisted for the OCM BOCAS prize fiction category.
What They Say
What a powerful writer unfashionably leisured and completely self-confident. A Caribbean One Hundred Years of Solitude."
– Fay Weldon
An impressively written work by a very gifted writer…subtle but compelling…strange and intriguing fiction with its layers of incurable pathos.”
– Wilson Harris (Wasafiri)
An engrossing and compulsive work of fiction…with a sensuous prose style…a vast gallery of characters – vivid, grotesque, miraculous, surprising, pathetic."
– Ken Ramchand
This novel has more of the tone and texture and taste of the Caribbean milieu than any novel I can think of. This is a wonderful novel: rich, sensuous, quirky, energetic, vividly memorable."
– Stewart Brown
One of the things that the re-publishing of this novel does is return us to tales we have read before, to old problems, that if we look at them now we might see something new. It comes at a good time. I believe that is still in the struggle for the Caribbean the idea that there is a we bound together by residence – we live here – and there is another we, the colonists or colonial other who live abroad and who have exploited our resources whether as absentee landlords or multi-nationals in oil etc and that we are engaged in a struggle with each other.
The truth is even more challenging. The struggle is with ourselves with each other, and what this work can do what art can do is to mediate between worlds. But in order to do so we must know these worlds. And that is why our friendships are not only to provide us with an agreeing chorus but help to equip us, and deepen our responsibility to shape our art.
There is one thing more… I was talking to some students at UTT about Josephine and the bed and what one student interpreted Josephine’s wanting the bed to mean was that she wanted to take madam’s place in the household.
This is another, a useful perspective.
So let me congratulate Lawrence and all connected with the re-publishing of this book. And wish all of you every success with it."
– extract from Earl Lovelace’s comments on Witchbroom at the Trinidad launch of the 2017 edition of the novel.
Read the review of Witchbroom in Small Axe here.
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