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Praise for Is Just a Movie by Earl Lovelace

“Is Just a Movie confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies.” —Ian Thomson, The Financial Times

“Funny, moving, endlessly inventive.” —The Times of London

“Lovelace’s fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken. In his new novel, he turns his attention to the remote fictional village of Cascadu and the lives of ordinary individuals whose relationship to politics, their peers, and their own weaknesses provide fascinating material. . . . Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century. This he does with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody. The scabs of racial tension are cautiously peeled back and we witness the community’s loves, aspirations, and machinations; their little victories and defeats, their best selves and worst selves. And when things become too difficult, there is always the spirit of Carnival that presides over their lives: recuperative, cathartic, communal, celebratory.”

—Bernadine Evaristo, The Guardian

“Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page. Lovelace’s writing is meticulously crafted but it retains its casual elegance.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“Earl Lovelace’s genius is revealed in his capacity to consistently write characters of complex sophistication that remain fully believable as products of their landscape and time even as the author conjures up riveting and often unusual circumstances in their lives. Lovelace’s characters are compelling because of the care and profound empathy with which he explores their thinking and their feelings. Lovelace understands Trinidad and its people, its music, its history, and its psyche in ways that have made him one of the most important writers to have emerged from the Caribbean in the last seventy years. Is Just a Movie manages to combine all the elements of the best calypso—a postmodernist sense of the world, an earthbound wit, a capacity for complex tragedy, and a haunting humanity. Lovelace makes you want to be Trinidadian.”

—Kwame Dawes

“The publication of a new novel by Earl Lovelace is an event to celebrate. This satire, while biting, is tempered with a pathos and humor which direct us to the fundamental humanity we have come to recognize in all of Lovelace’s writing.”

—Lawrence Scott, author, Night Calypso

“More than any other writer, the prose of Earl Lovelace is ‘Trini to the bone.’ And like the famed Cascadu river fish after which the village in Is Just a Movie is named, once its sweet flesh is tasted, the reader is destined to return to its shores.”

—Robert Antoni, author, Divina Trace and Carnival

“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, Makeda

“Music, broken hearts, revolution and scandal sway through the novel, which, like all of Lovelace’s books, is forged in the dizzying heat of Carnival and the hotbed of post-independence politics.”

—Metro (London)

Winner of the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature from the Regional Council of Guadeloupe