Caribbean Passages:

Offering a critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies, Patteson concentrates on five writers from diverse backgrounds and with differing perspectives and artistic strategies, who nevertheless share a commitment to an imaginative repossession of Caribbean life and consciousness.

The writers discussed are Olive Senior (Jamaica), who combines devices of oral narratives and sophisticated plot structures; Zee Edgell, in particular her internationally acclaimed first novel, Beka Lamb; Caryl Phillips, who writes of the cultural displacement of being black in England and how this becomes a spur to "imaginative sustenance"; Shiva Naipaul (Trinidad), whose work focuses on what is lost when a new society is formed: and Robert Antoni (Trinidad), whose writing embodies the process of creolization.