No Pain Like This Body

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 m…