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Summary
Summary
"A stellar debut . . . about an unconventional family, fear, hatred, violence, chasing love, losing it and finding it again just when we need it most."-- The New York Times Book Review
WINNER OF THE COSTA BOOK AWARD * "A wonder . . . [This book] teems with real, Trinidadian life."--Claire Adam, award-winning author of Golden Child
SEMI-FINALIST FOR THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE * One of the Best Books of the Summer: Time * The Guardian * Goop * Women's Day * LitHub
After Betty Ramdin's husband dies, she invites a colleague, Mr. Chetan, to move in with her and her son, Solo. Over time, the three become a family, loving each other deeply and depending upon one another. Then, one fateful night, Solo overhears Betty confiding in Mr. Chetan and learns a secret that plunges him into torment.
Solo flees Trinidad for New York to carve out a lonely existence as an undocumented immigrant, and Mr. Chetan remains the singular thread holding mother and son together. But soon, Mr. Chetan's own burdensome secret is revealed, with heartbreaking consequences. Love After Love interrogates love and family in all its myriad meanings and forms, asking how we might exchange an illusory love for one that is truly fulfilling.
In vibrant, addictive Trinidadian prose, Love After Love questions who and how we love, the obligations of family, and the consequences of choices made in desperation.
Praise for Love After Love
" Love After Love is gift after gift. An unforgettable symphony of love and loss, heartache and guilt, and the secrets and lies that pull us together, and tear us apart. Dazzlingly told in the most electrifying prose you will read all year." -- Marlon James, Booker Prize-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
"This book teems with real, Trinidadian life: neighbors so nosy they know your business before it happens; descriptions of food that'll have you googling recipes; feting and liming and plenty of sex. There's darkness here, too--violence, loneliness, moments of despair--and how Ingrid Persaud weaves all these elements together in one book, with so much warmth and humor and love for her characters, is a wonder." --Claire Adam, award-winning author of Golden Child
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Persaud's auspicious debut traces the gut-wrenching lives of a makeshift Trinidadian family over the past two decades. After Betty Ramdin's abusive, alcoholic husband, Sunil, dies, Betty invites a reserved math teacher, Mr. Chetan, to rent a room in her house. Chetan, who knows Betty as an administrator at his school, accepts the offer and forms a bond with Betty's five-year-old son, Solo. The three quickly form a de facto family, and Chetan shines in the kitchen ("She hand nowhere near sweet like mine," he says). Cracks emerge later, as Betty's attempt to initiate sex with Chetan falters when he reveals he is gay, and Solo, now a teenager, overhears Betty confess to Chetan that she caused Sunil's death by pushing him down a set of stairs. After Solo graduates high school, he illegally immigrates to New York City and cuts off all contact with his mother. Though Solo's uncle helps him find work, he isolates himself socially and descends into self-harm. Meanwhile, Chetan, who came of age when sodomy was illegal in Trinidad, navigates clandestine relationships with a controlling police officer and an old flame, now married. After Solo hears tragic news from Trinidad, he returns for a bittersweet reunion. In chapters alternately narrated by Solo, Betty, and Chetan in vibrant Trinidadian dialect, Persaud expertly maps the trio's emotional development and builds a complicated yet seamless plot full of indelible insights and poignant moments. This affecting family saga shines brightly. Agent: Zoe Waldie, RCW Lit Agency. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
Ingrid Persaud won both the 2017 Commonwealth short story prize and the 2018 BBC National short story award with "The Sweet Sop", a story about a son who supplies chocolate to his estranged dying father. This novel is her highly anticipated follow-up: the story of Trinidadian Betty Ramdin, who has suffered for years at the hands of her husband, an abusive drunk who "only gave love you could feel. He cuff you down? Honeymoon. He give you a black eye? True love in your tail." Widowhood is Betty's respite. Following her husband's death she takes in a lodger, Mr Chetan, a profoundly decent man who becomes Betty's best friend as well as a father figure to her young son, Solo. They settle into a platonic partnership - cooking, gardening and raising Solo - creating a family as an antidote to their own unyielding loneliness. Persaud has a knack for finding the sublime in the ordinary: in her hands the quotidian details of even apparently "small" lives lead to flashes of pure truth. The story is recounted through a series of tender, amusing vignettes, with Betty, Chetan and Solo taking turns at the narration. "You should see Mr Chetan and Solo," Betty says early on, "happy as pappy and I'm like a Wednesday in the middle." As with "The Sweet Sop", the language is colloquial, with both narrative and dialogue soaked in an ear-catching Trinidadian dialect. The prose is playful and rhythmic, seeming to beat its own drum, so that at times you don't read the novel so much as hear it. You sit in its company while it takes you into its confidence. Persaud plays with time as well as language, sometimes flitting over years in one paragraph, sometimes lingering forensically on a single episode. This feels slightly dizzying to begin with, but serves to draw us into a deeper intimacy with the characters, as if we have indeed born witness to a large span of their lives. When one evening Betty and Chetan are overheard by Solo spilling their deepest secrets to each other over glasses of rum, we feel a deep cut of grief at the way the revelations shatter their slapdash little family, causing Solo to flee to New York, where they "think all brown and black people make one way - thief, murderer, rapist or terrorist". There he is an illegal immigrant caught in a web of black-market fraudsters in his hunt for a fake social security number. Betty is left to grapple with a long, bitter estrangement from her son, even as she's tormented by the after-effects of an abusive marriage. Meanwhile, Chetan, driven by the realisation that "Miss B and I needed to be free to meet other people otherwise it was like we were in a sexless marriage", becomes distracted by yearning for his first love Mani, with whom he reconnects via social media only to be envious of the contentment he's found with his husband. It's our unfolding awareness of the unyielding direction of Chetan's desires - jolting him into "3am awakenings" and filling him with "fear, anticipation and horniness" - that sinks in deep. A raw, achingly sensual encounter with a stranger in a public toilet leaves him reeling, and the reader with him. "If things were different," he says, "I would have thanked him for making me feel unbroken, unmarked." This is one of the novel's most moving scenes, striking a tonal balance that seems almost alchemical. In "The Sweet Sop" it was the balance of "anger and humour and love" that earned accolades from the National short story award judges. Here, Persaud achieves another impeccable calibration: the contentment of Chetan's happy domestic life with Betty chafing against his acute loneliness as a gay man in a community where "simply being me is illegal, immoral and perverted". One of the reasons Love After Love is so delightful is that it reads like a modern meditation on the different kinds of love as catalogued by the ancient Greeks, crossed with the characters' deliciously gossipy self-reflection. Persaud gives us a captivating interrogation of love in all its forms, how it heals and how it harms, the twists and torments of obsession (mania), sex and romance (eros), family (storge), friendship (philia), acceptance or rejection by the community, and so on. But much like the Derek Walcott poem from which it takes its title, the novel is ultimately concerned with the possibilities of that elated and oddly elegiac moment when we finally come to love ourselves.
Kirkus Review
A found family attempts to mend their individual and shared wounds.This novel by Trinidadian author Persaud (If I Never Went Home, 2013), winner of the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, explores self-harm, sexuality, trauma, loneliness, and the idea of home. In the opening chapter, Betty, a young mother, is being physically abused by her husband. After his abrupt death pages later, she says: "That man only gave love you could feel. He cuff you down? Honeymoon. He give you a black eye? True love in your tail....He put you in hospital for a week? Love will stay the course. He take the knife and stab your leg? Until death do us part." Years later, Betty invites her colleague Mr. Chetan to live with her and Solo, her adolescent son, as a platonic lodger. As the three of them get to know each other, they create a stable and loving household. After Mr. Chetan shares his deepest secret with Betty, she decides to confess her ownonly to realize Solo has overheard the devastating details. The moment upends their family and changes their lives forever. To put space between himself and his mother, Solo embarks on a trip to New York to stay with his paternal uncle. Back in Trinidad, Betty tries to fix the relationship with her son while also finding herself as an individual. Eventually, Mr. Chetan moves out and attempts to live his truth, which puts him in great danger. As the years pass, the three of them grapple with the literal and figurative distance between them. Broken into three parts, the novel oscillates among the three characters' points of view. Writing in vibrant Trinidadian dialect, Persaud renders her characters with great empathy and care. If the novel's structure feels a bit uneven (with the second section dragging a bit), the ending gives readers some much-needed relief.A harrowing domestic drama full of heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Set in Trinidad, this affecting novel tells the story of an unconventional family: Miss Betty, a widow; her teenage son, Solo; and their lodger, Mr. Chetan, a teacher and closeted gay man. Following a failed sexual encounter with Miss Betty, Mr. Chetan comes out to her, an action that cements a loving friendship. All is well until something unexpected happens, so emotionally powerful it drives Solo away from home to the U.S., where he will live with his uncle, determined never to return to Trinidad. The story, told in alternating chapters from the three characters' respective, first-person points of view, follows the evolving nature of the troubled relationships among them. Self-hating Solo is especially troubled, finding relief only in cutting. Now estranged from her son, Miss Betty finds solace in her continuing friendship with Mr. Chetan, who struggles to find love with other men. Arriving without foreshadowing, a major incident that drives the novel's climax may seem arbitrary to some readers; however, it serves the essential purpose of reuniting mother and son. Beautifully written, the novel is told in Trinidadian dialect ("You here bazodee over a man you ain't seen since he was in short pants"). The skilled treatment of the characters brings them to vivid life, as it does the richly realized Trinidadian setting. An award-winning short story writer, Persaud demonstrates her skill with longer fiction in this superb debut novel.