View From Mount Diablo: An Annotated Edition

about

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.

Contents

In View from Mount Diablo, 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.

author

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.