One Day, One Day Congotay

Merle Hodge's rare achievement is to create a dynamic work of fiction around the life of a woman who is unquestionably good: Gwynneth Cuffie, schoolteacher, lover of children and music, and pillar of her small semi-rural community. The novel shares her adult life through the long, hard years of colonialism on the Caribbean island of Cayeri in the first half of the 20th century. Within Gwynneth's family are all the faultlines of the Cayerian world. She, with sister Viola and younger brother, Roy, are the children of ill-sorted parents, a marriage wrought from a surge of youthful sexual attraction, but thereafter of two Black lives headed in different directions.