No Pain Like This Body

"This classic of Canadian and Caribbean writing is set in an early 20th-century Hindu community in the Eastern Caribbean. The novel describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements seem unending and relentless and culminate in what seems to be unbearable loss. Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of raw courage."