I am circulating this on behalf of Niala Maharaj.
 
Best wishes
 
Diana Paton

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Book Notice

 

New Caribbean Novel Explodes the Myth of Island Paradise

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britain's largest supermarket chain, Tesco's, is advertising Like Heaven
on the web although it isn't yet off Random House's press. This debut
novel by Trinidad's Niala Maharaj is expected to seduce readers with a
mix of sex and politics, humour and hi-jinks.

 

'I can just see shoppers coming out of the grocery with a cauliflower, a
dozen beers, my book, and a pre-cooked tikka-massala,' the writer
laughs.

 

Like Heaven actually debunks popular concepts about the Caribbean,
focusing on corruption and race politics, but adopts the Trinidadian
habit of turning tragedy into comedy. Its title is taken from the speech
poet Derek Walcott made when he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature.


 

'And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the
sum of history, Trollope's "non-people". A downtown babel of shop signs
and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like
heaven.'

 

Walcott's poems attacked the Caribbean's image in early English
travelogues. 'There are no people here,' Trollope had said. Yet, when
writing about Trinidad, which is blessed not only with natural beauty
but immense natural resources, Walcott stated in an early poem, 'Hell is
a city much like Port of Spain'.

 

Niala's novel explores the reality that gives rise to these
pronouncements. It follows the adventures of Ved Saran, a reluctant
businessman who gets sucked into a whirlpool of politics and corruption.
Ved may be clear-sighted in his practical vision of the future, but he
is unable to apply the lessons he has learned to his private life. And
intense family pressures bind him tight when he needs to be free.

 

'Like Heaven shows how natural, ebullient innocence has a struggle to
survive under the extreme pressures of commercial development,' says
Paul Sidey of Random House, who is bringing out the book in June. Every
move Ved makes catapults cash into the family coffers. But he really
wants respect and love. Instead, he keeps getting what he calls 'close
encounters of the third kind' i.e. sex. His search involves him with a
cast of typical Trinidad eccentrics: a carnival leader whose motto is
'say no to curtains', a steel-band player working on the first Caribbean
symphony, corrupt politicians galore. And that's not even counting his
family.

 

'Ved's mother is a classic,' says Jeremy Taylor, publisher of the
Caribbean Review of Books.

 

'Like Heaven is epic in scope but intimate in detail,' says Paul Sidey.
'And Niala Maharaj has a vibrantly original new voice.'

 

It was Sidey who urged Niala to produce a novel some years ago when he
visited her in Amsterdam after reading stories she had written on a
sabbatical spent at Boston University.

 

'Her stories were a wonderful mixture of high hilarity, perceptive
psychology, and a sort of crazed social consciousness,' says Leslie
Epstein, Director of the Graduate School of Creative Writing there.
'No-one wrote like her then and I very much doubt that anyone is writing
like her now.'

 

 

For more information:

www.nialamaharaj.com <http://www.nialamaharaj.com/>

www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780091796563