Harold Sonny Ladoo

A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head.After years of suffering at the hands of white missionaries trying to convert Trinidadians to Christianity, Poonwa has decided, as payback, to go to Canada and start a Hindu mission. His father, Choonilal, doesn't want to borrow the money Poonwa needs from the corrupt local priest. The whole village gets dragged into the fight, a distraction from the usual arguments over latrines and sexual dalliances.First published in 1974, Yesterdays is a ribald, outrageous portrait of Trinidadian village life, and a prescient proto-parody of what would become the archetypal immigrant story. Sacred cows both literal and figurative are skewered in a series of increasingly absurd encounters between villagers who can't keep their noses – and other body parts – out of their neighbours' business.A foreword by Kevin Jared Hosein contextualizes this important book, which was politically and aesthetically ahead of its time but lost after the untimely death of Harold Sonny Ladoo."Yesterdays upends conventional narratives that find sexual liberation in the postindustrial city. Ladoo's agrarian villagers inhabit the fullness of their complex humanities in audaciously funny and often uncomfortable ways, and are radically at ease with their fluid sexual appetites. An under-appreciated gem, his novel is as much a testament to Ladoo's skillful observation and rendering of the world that surrounded him as it is to the value of being tellers of our own stories." – Andil Gosine, author of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean"Yesterdays is the novel, underappreciated on its initial release and since forgotten, that should have charted a deviant, audacious path through the staid self-seriousness of Canadian literature. Let's hope there's still time." – Pasha Malla, author of All You Can Kill

'A masterpiece of hurt' New York TimesWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONIQUE ROFFEYIn the Caribbean, at the beginning of the last century, a poor rice-growing family struggle to exist. Four siblings pass their days in the ricefield, as does Ma. But Pa is an angry man ready to vent. It is the August rainy season and above their heads the black sky crackles with lightning.On the day that Pa nearly drowns Ma in a tub of washing water, the children and their mother escape into the cane fields to wait out Pa's rage. But eight-year-old Rama, catches a chill in the rain and falls ill. What follows is a tale of the inheritance of loss. It contains a heart-stopping intensity that places it as one of the greatest Caribbean novels ever written.'It is a novel unconcerned with anything but truth-telling' Dionne Brand'To anyone who knows Caribbean literature his novel is infamous, and Ladoo is seen as one of the region's great literary stars' Independent'Ladoo drags you through this terrific hurricane, and you can never forget it' Amanda Smyth, author of Fortune

The A List edition of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s enduring novel, a raw, unsentimental story of life in a small Caribbean community. Featuring a new introduction by David Chariandy Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.