The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar by Kevin Baldeosingh

As the consultations continue, Dr. Sankar's professional expertise is tested to the full. On the one hand, his patient appears to behave with impeccable rationality, on the other, the accounts Avatar brings of his previous lives suggest buried traumas of the most worrying kind.

And when Avatar's narratives of the experiences of his past selves are revealed to have an authenticity that cannot be explained away, Dr Sankar's perplexity grows.

Kevin Baldeosingh brings a powerful narrative drive to this unfolding mystery, a Joycean variety of historical Englishes to the accounts of Avatar's lives and a vivid and persuasive grasp of each historical period. But the novel also asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of power, the relationship between abuser and abused and the malleability of the person in different social environments.

Set in Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad, The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar is an epic account of the New World experience and a provocative enquiry into the nature of history and what it means to be a Caribbean person.

Kevin Baldeosingh was born in 1963 in Trinidad. He was educated at the University of the West Indies, where he also got a BA. He is a novelist and newspaper columnist. He writes two weekly newspaper columns: a satirical column in the Weekend Independent and a slightly sarcastic one for the Trinidad Express.
He likes squash, volleyball, tennis and the women who play them.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a writer with a funny bone, a far cry from the traditional Caribbean novelist: here social realism is couched within an ambient irony-cum-satire… without the faintest Dryden-like "gentle raillery." World Literature Today

In a fit of comic brilliance, Baldeosingh has invented the Zelig-like Paras Parmanandansingh. His quixotic quest for Proper Behaviour provides ongoing laughter with just a few pauses to let readers catch a breath. Paras's wild conceit and oblivious preposterousness allow readers to laugh at him, even at his comedic downfall. But what is central is Baldeosingh's sharp but loving, satiric commentary on all facets of Caribbean life, identity and self-hatred, the place of women and, above all, the inescapable love-hate relationship with the Empire.
Publishers Weekly.