The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet

• National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS), Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago

Mona remembers all too clearly the night of the big row in the house on Manahambre Road, back on her native island of Trinidad. Da-da, driven into a drunken rage by Muddie's refusal to sell their home, seemed ready to kill Mona's nine-year-old brother, Kello. That was when everything changed, when they began, as Muddie said, pitching about from pillar to post. Now, 35 years later, Kello lies dying in a Toronto hospice, and Mona must confront her own past, as well as the secrets of a winding family history begun on the Indian continent almost two centuries ago.
Mona wryly perceives herself as the calm at the centre of her family's storm. With uncles and aunts and cousins scattered around the world, with her parents unhappy in Toronto, with her siblings making their own lives, she yearns to make sense of this tortured family. But how can she do this when she herself is doubly displaced? As she visits her dying brother, and as she reacquaints herself with her irrepressible cousin, Bess, Mona finally understand that she must reconcile past and present before she can have a future.
The Swinging Bridge is a story steeped in the rhythms and lyrical lilt of Caribbean life, a novel that explores the immigrant experience with compassion and humour.

RAMABAI ESPINET was born in Trinidad and Tobago and has lived in Canada for more than 25 years. She is a poet, a writer of fiction and essays, a critic and an academic. Her published works include the poetry collection Nuclear Seasons, and two children's books, The Princess of Spadina and Ninja's Carnival. She edited Creation Fire, an anthology of Caribbean women's poetry. She lives in Toronto.