Ferron has lived in awe of his father’s radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980s’ resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was ‘already dead to everything that had meaning for him’.

Ferron’s response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancée, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep running from trouble.

This is a sharply focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society’s scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of ‘the corpse of one’s origins’ and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward.