In this beautifully imagined novel, based on the horrific true events at Jim Jones' utopian commune in Guyana, the acclaimed novelist, playwright and poet Fred D'Aguiar returns to the land of his youth, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a story that resonates with love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an unlikely ally, an extraordinary gorilla The commune was meant to shepherd them to Paradise. Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, have followed a charismatic preacher from California to the jungles of Guyana, along with nearly a thousand others of God's chosen people, where they have built a communist utopia based on a rigid order and unceasing loyalty. When Trina, playing too close to the cage holding the commune's pet gorilla, Adam, is attacked, everyone believes she has been killed. That night, the preacher dramatically "revives" her-an act that transforms Trina into a symbol of the commune's righteousness and its leader's extraordinary, God-like power. But Trina's resurrection is both a blessing and a curse for Joyce. Life in the compound has become precarious since she rejected the preacher's sexual advances. The danger has only grown since her skepticism of the commune's harsh mandates and punishments have become increasingly known. To save herself and Trina from the inevitable mass suicides that the commune has already begun to rehearse, she attempts a daring escape, aided by the local boat captain that loves her, and the most unlikely of prisoners-the extraordinary Adam. Told with a sweeping perspective in lush prose, shimmering with magic, and devastating in its clarity, Children of Paradise is a brilliant and evocative exploration of oppression-of both mind and body-and of the liberating power of storytelling.
Author
Poet, novelist and playwright Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents. He lived in Guyana until he was 12, returning to England in 1972. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. His first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim and established his reputation as one of the finest British poets of his generation. Along with Airy Hall (1989), it won the Guyana Poetry Prize in 1989 and was followed by British Subjects (1993). His first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation and won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. His long poem 'Sweet Thames' was broadcast as part of the BBC 'Worlds on Film' series in 1992, winning the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. Fred D'Aguiar was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University (1989-90), Visiting Writer at Amherst College, Amherst, MA (1992-4), and was Assistant Professor of English at Bates College, Lewiston, ME (1994-5). More recently he was Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. His plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991. He is also the author of the novels Dear Future (1996), set on a fictional Caribbean island, and Feeding the Ghosts (1997), inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and based on the true story of a slave who survived being thrown overboard with 132 other men, women and children from a slave ship in the Atlantic. Recent poetry includes Bill of Rights (1998), a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, and a new long narrative poem, Bloodlines, the story of a black slave and her white lover, published in 2000. Fred D'Aguiar's fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering symbolises that of a nation seeking to make itself whole again.
