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Published Jul 1999
334 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Easter, 1981, and Jamaica's in a state of emergency. With violence in the streets and a government about to collapse, the Landing family gathers to bury one of its own. For Monica Landing, the proud, imperious matriarch who had not spoken to her daughter in fifteen years, the death of Lana Landing is the cruelest kind of loss. For Lana's younger sister, Jean, it is a tragedy she cannot comprehend. All she knows is that her beloved homeland, with its blue mountains and exuberant flora, its rich African rhythms and crashing ocean waves, holds no future for her.
But flight means crossing a landscape where soldiers turned executioners and armed gangs rule, where fires rage and unburied bodies lie in the roads. Flight means making her way through the memories that engulf her, with a good and silent man, perhaps the only man she has ever loved, traveling by her side, caught up in his own tormented memories of Jean's beautiful, flamboyant sister.
Told from a multiplicity of perspectives, True History of Paradise captures the grace, beauty, and brutality that are indelible parts of the Jamaican experience. The story of three women born into a divided, troubled paradise becomes the history of a country, of generations of wanderers coming together in a place that can neither sustain nor be sustained by them, but that will shape them forever.
"She manages to depict with vivid immediacy Jamaica's terrors and seductions, portraying a society in which poverty is endemic, and a sense of menace exists in a setting of paradisal beauty." - Publishers Weekly.
"Cezair-Thompson's first novel is a dynamic crazy quilt, often jumping too rapidly from one time period to another but suffused throughout with descriptions of Jamaica's tropical flowers, fruits, and foods. The family tree is necessary to keep track of the characters, and the glossary of Jamaican dialect is helpful. Yet despite these scholarly trappings, this is a lively work of fiction. Stretch out in the sun and enjoy." - Library Journal.
"While some may have trouble keeping track of the seemingly never-ending list of characters that slip in and out of Jean's life, Cezair-Thompson's ambitious family drama will nonetheless pull readers in with its solid craftsmanship and good old-fashioned storytelling." - Booklist.
"A heartbreakingly rich, beautiful story whose characters hauntingly embody their country's travail, for which novelist-screenwriter Cezair-Thompson has devised the perfect structure. A very accomplished debut." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Margaret Cezair-Thompson's first novel, is a brilliant, sophisticated piece of fiction. For those who love Jamaica, The True History of Paradise is a vivid and evocative work and one that fully lives up to its title." - Island Magazine.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson was born in Jamaica, West Indies; she attended St Andrews High School for
Girls, a long-established government-subsidized school that has produced many of
Jamaican's most prominent women. She also spent a year at a Roman Catholic
boarding school in the countryside called Servite Convent of the Assumption
School for Girls—which was a bit like the school she describes Ida as attending
in The Pirate's Daughter. She was expelled after a year and
returned happily to St Andrews.
She came of age as Jamaica emerged from being a British colony to being an
independent nation. She left Jamaica at nineteen years old to attend Barnard
College in New York where she received a B.A. in English. She received her
Ph.D. in English ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Margaret Cezair-Thompson's Website
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