The first novel from a major new talent in Anglo-Caribbean writing set in & 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 is Jacob Ross`s extraordinary debut novel of a boy born blind but whose eyes are healed, allowing him to see great beauty. The story charts the painful awakening of a rural population, essentially organised around serfdom, into a raw & 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 & cousins, & 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 isl&, occasionally returns to the family on his brief periods out of jail. When Pynter comes to love a woman, & later flees his family to hide in the canes from the marauding soldiers, he can no longer ignore the violent world beyond the yard where he lives.` Pynter Bender` is about the conflict between the world of men & women, men who walk away from their families & from the cane fields & their women who forbear. It brilliantly describes the birth of a modern West Indian island & the shaping of its people as they struggle to shuck off the systems that have essentially kept them in slavery for centuries.