Set in 1942 on the imagined island of San Carlos, a cultural cocktail of Trinidad, Cuba, and Jamaica, this is the story of Estrella Thompson, a headstrong fourteen-year-old girl who’s forced to fend for herself when she’s banished from the isolated fishing village where she’s lived all her life. Colin Channer ’s major works of fiction include the novel Waiting in Vain and the story collection Passing Through, which Junot Díaz described as “a splendid collection by one of the Caribbean Diaspora’s finest writers.” He also edited Iron Hit Fiction from Jamaica’s Calabash Writer’s Workshop (Akashic Books, 2006). Channer is an assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the BA creative writing program at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.