Jane Clifton

But the absence of his father has allowed for an amazing third character to come into their lives, Mr. Chetan.

Mr. Chetan comes and lives with them as a boarder, and the three of them, Betty and her son Solo, and Chetan develop a strong bond and relationship.

Mr. Chetan and Betty never actually get together, because that's another secret in the book that I won't lay on you right now and be a spoiler, but the thing that I found most powerful in all of it was the immersion

into language, culture, food, music, all of the various bits of, I suppose, Trinidadian slang and references just really took me to a place where I could see the characters and I could see the world around them.

in almost a pious way in her conversations but her inner voice is pretty robust isn't it absolutely yeah so tell us about how that works well i think it's it i mean initially it feels a little bit limiting to be within the minds of three first person narratives but then the i think

the structure is set up so that you spend a few pages inside of Betty's mind and then a few pages inside of Chetan and then a few pages inside of Solo.

So it continues in that vein with references to lapses of time, representing that now we're talking to Mr. Chetan, but it's maybe two years after we just heard from Betty.

What I'm fascinated by is the dialogue, actually.

So there is an

interesting inner language going on within each person's brain, and that's well represented by Persaud, but I feel like the individual quirks of language come out really strongly in the dialogue, none of which is

none of it's got this kind of quotation grammar marks.

It's all really empty prose in terms of grammar.

I don't know if you can call it that, but it's missing any quotes.

So all of the dialogue is basically just an indented bit of text with spaces in between.

So I was a little bit confused by that choice.

But I think it's quite musical, the language as well, and

I don't know.

I don't think I could say it out loud without sounding offensive because I definitely don't sound like a Trinidadian Caribbean person.

But did you find that you had to stop and kind of look up words or were you kind of across phrases like, he gave me the cut eye and we're going to go out liming tonight?

Oh, absolutely.