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by Harold Sonny Ladoo (Author), Kevin Jared Hosein (Foreword by)
A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head.
Originally published in 1974, Yesterdays is nominally the story of one man's attempt to launch a Hindu Mission from Trinidad to convert the heathen Christians of Canada. Yet this conceit quickly derails into a ribald, outrageous portrait of West Indian village life, and a prescient, proto-parody of what would become the archetypal 'immigrant story.' Sacred cows both figurative and literal are skewered in a series of hilarious and increasingly bawdy encounters between villagers who gossip, cheat, and steal, but also form a balanced, if chaotic, collectivity.
Yesterdays is one of the great lost English-language novels of the previous century--perhaps ahead of its own time upon its initial release, but sure to appeal to 21st-century audiences who will appreciate its startling prescience, linguistic inventiveness, as well as its bold singularity amid a canon glutted with paint-by-numbers respectability.
"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
Author Biography
Harold Sonny Ladoo was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1945 and immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968. He is the author of No Pain Like This Body and his second novel, Yesterdays, was published posthumously in 1974.
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist. He has also worked as a secondary school biology teacher for over a decade. He was named overall winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018, and was the Caribbean regional winner in 2015. He has published two books: The Repenters and The Beast of Kukuyo. The latter received a CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature, and both have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His writings, fiction and non-fiction, have been published in numerous anthologies and outlets including Lightspeed Magazine, Moko, Wasafiri and adda. He lives in Trinidad and Tobago.
