Suspended Sentences Fictions of Atonement

When a group of graduating students is caught vandalizing an exclusive Guyanese club, their punishment is to write a short story about the newly independent Guyana. Years later, as a tribute to the life of one of the former classmates now feared dead, the author has collected the rest of the stories written by his classmates. The group of stories works like Chaucerian tales to slowly reveal their teller as well as to chart the history and future of Guyanese fiction.

Mark McWatt is the author of Interiors and The Language of Eldorado, which won the Guyana Prize. He is the head of the English department at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus, Barbados.