The Guyana Quartet: ‘Genius’ (Jamaica Kincaid)

‘An exhilarating experience … Genius.’ - Jamaica Kincaid

I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye …

Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the birthplace of an epic masterpiece.

Wilson Harris’ The Guyana Quartet consists of four incandescent novels: Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. It is a landmark of twentieth-century literature, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.

‘The Guyanese William Blake … [Such] poetic intensity.’ - Angela Carter

‘One of the great originals … Visionary … Dazzlingly illuminating.’ - Guardian

‘Amazing … Masterly … Near-miraculous.’ - Observer

‘Perhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.’ - Fred D'Aguiar

‘An extraordinary writer … Courageous and visionary … It speaks to us in tongues.’ - Pauline Melville

‘Staggering … Both brilliant and terrifying.’ - The Times