Short stories
Summer Lightning and Other Stories
Olive Senior · 1986
Synopsis
Ten stories from rural Jamaica, most often seen through children who watch adults without always understanding them. In “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?”, little Beccka, who reads the Bible the better to challenge it, puts to the English archdeacon visiting her aunt questions that scandalise the household; in “Bright Thursdays”, Laura, daughter of a young single mother, is sent to her paternal grandparents, in a well-off house where she finds no place; elsewhere, little Benjy dreams of an ice cream he has never tasted.
Context
The collection appeared in 1986 with Longman, in its series of Caribbean writers, in one hundred and thirty-four pages; its author had begun writing it in Ottawa, during her journalism studies at Carleton University. It was her first collection of short stories, after a first book published in 1985, and she saw in it a faithful expression of the daily life of the island's remote countryside, in its beliefs as in its language. Christine Raguet translated it into French for Éditions Zoé in 2011.
Who it is for
In English mixed with Jamaican Creole, the very language of the characters; short stories, often told from a child's point of view.
Prizes and reception
Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1987; selected in 2022 among the seventy titles of the Big Jubilee Read, and cited by Marlon James among his ten favourite books.
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