Is Just a Movie: A Novel

Front Cover
Haymarket Books, Mar 27, 2012 - Fiction - 367 pages
A “funny, moving, endlessly inventive” novel of life in a Trinidadian town during a time of change and revolutionary fervor (The Times).

In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970’s Black Power Uprising, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town’s folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love—and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life.

“Earl Lovelace is arguably the Caribbean’s greatest living novelist. In Is Just a Movie, he writes at the top of his considerable literary powers, picturing the Caribbean’s poor and powerless defending their ever-embattled humanity with resourcefulness and tenacity.” —Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century . . . with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody.” —Guardian

Is Just a Movie is not just a movie, it’s a poem, too.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

“Confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies.” —Financial Times

“Starring two hapless almost-beens in search of movie fame, Is Just A Movie takes us on wild loving absurdist journey to the heart of a contemporary Trinidad.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe’s Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Section 19
Section 20
Section 21
Section 22
Section 23
Section 24
Section 25
Section 26

Section 9
Section 10
Section 11
Section 12
Section 13
Section 14
Section 15
Section 16
Section 17
Section 18
Section 27
Section 28
Section 29
Section 30
Section 31
Section 32
Section 33
Section 34
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Earl Lovelace: Earl Lovelace was born in Toco, Trinidad, and has lived most of his life on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. His books include While Gods Are Falling, winner of the BP Independence Award, the Caribbean classic The Dragon Can't Dance, and Salt, which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. For Is Just a Movie, he has won the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe.

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