God Carlos

(Paperback)

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God Carlos transports the reader to a voyage aboard the Santa Inez, a Spanish sailing vessel bound for the newly-discovered West Indies with an arrogant bunch of gold-seekers. When they arrive they find no gold; only a merciless climate that nurtures deadly disease. There are also the Arawaks, a native tribe who believed the Europeans had come from heaven. This impossible entanglement of culture, custom and beliefs ultimately ends in doom. Written by acclaimed Jamaican author Anthony C. Winkler, God Carlos is a gripping tale that virtually pulls readers into the story.

Reviews

Set in the sixteenth century, Winkler's latest novel is something like Heart of Darkness meets Animal Farm. But what happens when Jamaica's most flamboyantly irreverent and fiercely contemporary novelist tackles the past Why, the past becomes flamboyantly irreverent and fiercely contemporary. Winkler's achievement here is not that he remakes himself as a historical writer, but that he remakes history.
--Kei Miller, author of The Last Warner Woman

Winkler is renowned in the West Indies for his comic genius. In God Carlos, he undertakes the formidable task of imagining the region's damaged history--unwritten and seemingly unreachable--with such ease and insight that we find ourselves transported to sixteenth-century Jamaica, as we watch the story unfold before our eyes.
--Robert Antoni, author of Carnival

A vivid and powerful account of the tragedy unleashed upon the native peoples of the Caribbean in the years following the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
--Jaime Manrique, author of Cervantes Street

Winkler never glosses over Jamaican deprivation, prejudice, and violence, yet the love of language--and the language of love--somehow conquers all. It's almost as if P.G. Wodehouse had strolled into the world of Bob Marley...Winkler's fiction magics the island into a place of rough-edged enchantment.
--The Independent (UK)

Every country (if she's lucky) gets the Mark Twain she deserves, and Winkler is ours.
--Marlon James, author of The Book of Night Women

Winkler has a fine ear for patois and dialogue, and a love of language that makes bawdy jokes crackle.
--The New Yorker

Author Bio

Anthony C. Winkler was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1942 and is widely recognized as one of the island's finest exports. After being expelled from Cornwall College for refusing to submit to corporal punishment (which entailed being beaten with a cane), he eventually made his way to California where he attended Citrus College and California State University, earning a BA and MA in English. His first published novel, The Painted Canoe (1984), received critical acclaim and was followed by The Lunatic (1987), The Great Yacht Race (1992), The Duppy (1997), Crocodile (2009), Dog War (2007), God Carlos (2012), and The Family Mansion, among others. Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer, his autobiography, was published in 2008. His writing credits also include film scripts and plays. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife Cathy.