Book description
Elspeth Baillie, a young Scottish actress, is chosen by enigmatic
impresario Lord Coak for an acting career on the Island of Barbados.
At first fêted by the colonial gentry, her life in the Caribbean does
not go according to plan. Elspeth is obliged to take on a temporary
and ambiguous role in the closed world of Coak's remote sugar
plantation. Dolan's plot is full of unexpected twists as Elspeth
becomes ever more the prisoner of a venture whose founding principle
is white supremacy. Captain Shaw, the factor, sets about building a
New Caledonia whose reality for Elspeth and her new compatriots is a
sense of timelessness and loss. Nature, ideology and the drive to
maximise profit conspire to endanger the invented community. Elspeth
is left trying to make sense of her own life and youthful ambitions
among a shipwrecked people dreaming of home. Linguistically rich and
narratively hypnotic, Dolan's novel asks what makes a nation.
Bloodlines? Language? History? Or some ideal for the future? Elspeth's
hopes for a new world, full of drama and passion, collide with the all
too real drama and elusive loves of colonial life.
Chris Dolan writes for page, stage and screen. An early short story
won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Competition, and Poor Angels and
Other Stories was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First
Book of the Year Award in 1995. A second collection of stories, Hour
After Hour, was published in 2008. Other stories have appeared in
various magazines and anthologies and have been broadcast on BBC Radio.
His first novel, Ascension Day, won the McKitterick Prize. His
non-fiction books include An Anarchist's Story. The Life of Ethel
Macdonald, and John Lennon, The Original Beatle. He broadcasts regularly
on TV and radio. Winner of an Edinburgh Fringe First, he has written
several plays, performed internationally, including the only stage
adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. Dolan has written
extensively for radio and television, both drama and documentary,
including An Anarchist's Story, and a history of poor whites in the
Caribbean, Barbado'ed (both BBC). He is also a published poet, columnist
and teacher.
