Light Falling on Bamboo

From an acclaimed, prize-winning Trinidadian author comes an epic interracial period piece dramatizing the life of a 19th-century colonial artist

After a gentleman's education in Europe, landscape artist Michel Jean Cazabon returns home to Trinidad in 1848 in time for his mother's death, and discovers the changes to his island since the emancipation of slaves. Plantation owners and colonial administrators still hold the power, leaving freed blacks and "coloreds" not quite free; the idealism of revolutionary Paris now seems a dream away and his French wife and children are waiting to join him on the island. The busy working artist makes friends with the governor and English colonial settlers and secures commissions and painting lessons, but his sensual desires always threaten to compromise his prospects. His career may prosper, but he is more worried about his white wife's reaction to a family secret kept hidden by his father, mother, and a corrupted colonial island.