The first novel from a major new talent in Anglo-Caribbean writing set in and around the cane fields of Grenada.Pynter Bender is a child of the cane fields of Grenada, the second smallest independent state in the world. This extraordinary novel, Jacob Ross's first, experienced through a boy born blind but whose eyes are healed, charts the painful awakening of a rural population, essentially organised around serfdom, into a raw and uncertain future that can only be achieved through fighting, a civil war that Pynter is drawn in to.Pynter's father leaves him to be brought up by the Bender women, a close-knit group of aunts and cousins, and Pynter's early life is shaped by these women. He begins to understand a world beyond them when his uncle, Birdie the Beloved, the best baker on the island, occasionally returns to the family on his brief periods out of jail. When Pynter comes to love a woman, and later flees his family to hide in the canes from the marauding soldiers,...

The stand out feature of Closure is its richness – of styles, forms, themes, and ways of telling that display a keen awareness of the contemporary short story while exploiting the suppleness of the form to serve the imaginative needs of the writer. The richness is also in the tremendous array of moods and levels of intensity of these stories. Raw realism gives way to pure lyricism; the fanciful rubs shoulders with the speculative. Within this anthology, there is trauma and humour; tenderness and transgression. These narratives are about our humanity: the ways in which we do and do not love, unrequited yearnings, the quiet unstated violence in our lives, the way we obscure loneliness, and of course the precious moments of jubilation.