Yesterdays

(Paperback)

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Description

A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head.

Originally published in 1974, Yesterdays is nominally the story of one mans attempt to launch a Hindu Mission from Trinidad to convert the heathen Christians of Canada. Yet this conceit quickly derails into a ribald, outrageous portrait of West Indian village life, and a prescient, proto-parody of what would become the archetypal "immigrant story." Sacred cows both figurative and literal are skewered in a series of hilarious and increasingly bawdy encounters between villagers who gossip, cheat, and steal, but also form a balanced, if chaotic, collectivity. Yesterdays is one of the great lost English-language novels of the previous centuryperhaps ahead of its own time upon its initial release, but sure to appeal to 21st-century audiences who will appreciate its startling prescience, linguistic inventiveness, as well as its bold singularity amid a canon glutted with paint-by-numbers respectability.

Author Bio

Harold Sonny Ladoo was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1945 and immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968. He is the author of No Pain Like This Body and his second novel, Yesterdays, was published posthumously in 1974.