Ralph Thompson, View from Mount Diablo
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"The introduction seems masterful to me and the condensed learning in it is astonishing .... a fine, fine achievement which ... will help set the book on the road to being a classic""--Ian McDonald
Sample Files
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View Sample PagesThe Peepal Tree/HEB annotated edition of Ralph Thompson's View from Mount Diablo.
This Ebook is also available in hard copy at £12.99 from Peepal Tree Press and as a library Ebook from MyiLibrary.com.
A verse-novel that won the Jamaican National Literary Award in 2001, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation.
Class and racial privilege and the resentments they provoke underscore both turmoil in wider society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters.
The annotated edition by John Lennard, Professor of British and American Literature at UWI–Mona in Kingston, allows the full scope of the verse-novel to emerge for readers unfamiliar with Jamaican history since the 1930s.
Ralph Thompson
Ralph Thompson (b. 1928) is a white Catholic Jamaican of crypto-Jewish stock. Educated on the island and then at Fordham University by Jesuits, he has lived there all his life, following careers in business with Seprod that ended with his successful tenure as CEO, and in public life as an educational activist, a painter, and a poet, which jointly won him appointment as a Commander of Distinction. His other poetry includes the collections The Denting of a Wave and Moving On, both published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in Leeds.