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Molly is raised in the harsh surroundings of Accrington, Lancashire, during the years leading up to World War Two. Systematically abused by her father and his band of pals, becoming consummate in sex and hatred at an early age, she matures into a wounded and broken creature, half soothsayer, half madwoman: a creation to rival the fabulous beings of Guyanese myth. As her life story unfolds, we enter an absurdist narrative peopled with talking animals, demented prophets, shape-shifting ghosts, Amerindian asylum seekers and a Muslim walking stick. Raleigh’s discovery of Guiana, the Suez Crisis, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the ‘clash of civilisations’ – much here resonates with the impulses of the Third World canon, yet David Dabydeen’s gentle insistence that only pity can cleanse away the crimes of history, and the magical transformations enacted by his jewelled and sumptuous prose, ensure the reader’s bewitchment throughout this rich and strangely wrought, marvellous tale of human suffering and redemption.

English literature