Tall Is Her Body

Summary

A genre-defying saga of one young man’s inheritance of ghosts and journey to wholeness against the collapse of the West Indies’ banana industry during the 1990s, for readers of Black Cake and Family Lore.

Before the gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, 6-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.

Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.

“A memorable, generous, and vivid addition to a Caribbean lineage inaugurated by the likes of Kincaid, Selvon, Roumain, and Lovelace. Tender and unsparing, de la Chevotière’s triumphant entrance more than meets the bill. A soaring work.”—Canisia Lubrin, acclaimed poet, editor, and author on Tall Is Her Body