With close on five hundred pages, this is good, solid value, in literary terms as well as of sheer reading bulk. The Caribbean itself is a seething racial and cultural melting pot, so that the authors included in this collection write variously in English, French, Spanish and (don't forget it) Dutch. Illustrious names are among them, too - Jean Rhys (from Dominica), Alejo Carpenter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul. The youngest writer included is the exotically named Edwige Danticat, a Haitian born in 1969. There is a good deal of dialogue in local dialect(s), inevitably, but not enough to discourage communication overall, nor does the local colour - although there is plenty of it - get out of hand.
Brian Fallon
