A Place to Hide

An incisive portrayal of contemporary Jamaican society that touches corners few other writers have reached. Murder, madness, love, child abuse, church-going all find their place. It convincingly creates a host of highly distinctive voices telling their own stories with dramatic power. It is a deeply personal collection in that the stories focus on inwardly drawn characters who are in search of personal meaning (or indeed personal salvation) and the fullest expression of their sensual selves, themes that form the core of Dawes’s own poetry. A deeply reflexive collection that asks how can the violence and disorder of Jamaican society be meaningfully told without mere sensationalism or passive submission to brute facts. It is a collection about the possibility of creativity in such a society, told through the Vershan episodes that intercut the stories like dub versions with their celebrations of moments of reggae creation in the studio. Above all, it is a collection that rises to heights of towering myth in the penultimate story, ‘Marley’s Ghost’, a story of soaring imagination that will surely make the neck hairs of the reader rise.