Under The Perfume Tree
A free-spirited Amerindian girl, encountering British sailors for the first time; a Dutch bo’sun marooned by pirates on the bare rock Saba; an indentured descendant of Pathan soldiers labouring on a hillside estate; a strange boy nurtured in a thriving community of former slaves, an illiterate Lebanese shoemaker and his teenage bride.
A young magistrate moving his family from island to island; a single mother from Guangdong, China; a doctor’s wife of aristocratic Prussian descent; a Guyanese student in London; these are some of the extraordinary ordinary people who feature in this collection of stories.
Fiction or astonishing fact, recollection or recreation, this selection, over and above the telling of compelling stories, vividly captures the way people of different cultures and means have gone about the daily business of living in the West Indies over the last five hundred years.
