What a series of delightful events the 2024 Bocas Lit Fest was! My thanks to the organizers for including me. Here are a few photos:
Myriam Chancy in conversation
With Dionne Brand and Angelique Nixon
Millington and Jay, two very discreet, middle-aged men living in Montreal, are in the fourth year of a marriage that seems idyllic to their friends. But the marriage is hidden from their parents, who live in St Vincent, and it is fraught with Millington’s problems from untreated trauma and his former career as a Methodist minister. And Then Again Begin (volume 4 of The No Safeguards Quartet) reveals their surprising discoveries as they attempt to resolve these problems.
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H. Nigel Thomas is a master of dialogue. In this telescoped and diaristic story memory, history, sexuality, religion, masculinity, metropolitan life, and post-colonial life–all collide. The lives lived in these pages are riven by persistent contradictions, pleasures and disappointments. Thomas is at his best as his characters reveal in their own words the many difficult and endearing truths of this powerful tale of familial revelations. This is a story told with bold intimacy from the powerful pen of a writer at the height of his powers.
—Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property
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H. Nigel Thomas immigrated to Canada from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1968. He is the author of dozens of essays, seven novels, three collections of short fiction, two collections of poems, and two academic books. His novels Spirits in the Dark (1993) and No Safeguards (2015) were shortlisted for the Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award. The French translation of Lives: Whole and Otherwise—Des vies cassées—was a finalist for the Carbet des lycéens Award. He is the founder and English-language coordinator of Lectures Logos Readings and is the recipient of many awards; the most recent are Laureate Black History Month (2024), the Canada Council John Molson Prize for the Arts (2022), The Quebec Writers’ Federation Judy Mappin Community Award (2021), and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Achievement Award (2020).
With thanks to Ella who did the in-store coordination, created the graphic for the launch, and took the photographs; to Moti and Adèle, of Argo Books, who’ve supported my work over the years; to Janis Kirschner, who has enthusiastically publicized the book and the launch, to the audience who braved the cold and snow to support me; to Ethel Meilleur who provided dessert; and of course to Nalini Mohabir who studiously read the novel and prepared a set of insightful and brilliant questions for the interview that began the launch.
Photo with Nalini Mohabir who did a stellar job interviewing me
Part of the audience
Signing a book for friend and writer colleague Ethel Meilleur
https://hnigelthomas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/adh-synopsis.docx
SYNOPSIS, A Different Hurricane by H. Nigel Thomas, available January 14, 2025
On the morning of Saturday September 9, 2017, while Hurricane Irma is devastating parts of the Caribbean, Gordon Wiley, aged 68, awakens shaken by the news of the murder of Jamaican gay activist Dexter Pottinger. In two days, it will be the first anniversary of his wife Maureen’s death, for which he is partly responsible. Their daughter Frida, who thinks that her father is the paragon of virtue, is arriving from Toronto that same evening so they can visit Maureen’s grave the following Monday.
Dexter Pottinger’s murder plunges a guilt-ridden Gordon into a prolonged reflection on his own gay life. He and Allan Bacchus, who grew up in nearby villages, were lovers until age 29. To circumvent St Vincent’s virulent homophobia, both men first dated women to pass themselves off as heterosexuals. But Maureen’s pregnancy forced Gordon into an unwanted marriage.
Three days after Frida’s birth, Gordon left for Montreal on a scholarship which bonded him to work for the St Vincent and Grenadines government for seven years. As a student in Montreal, at the beginning of the 1980s, Gordon experienced the fullness of gay life without the fears of social and legal persecution. But his irresistible desire to be a hands-on dad and his contract to return to St Vincent triumphed.
After repressing his homosexuality for over a decade, a change in his job required him to make frequent trips to Trinidad and gave him the opportunity to have a gay relationship there, from which he contracted AIDS and in turn infected Maureen.
Allan Bachus is an MD and married to Beth, Maureen’s closest friend and colleague, but has gay lovers. He helps Gordon and Maureen manage their illness in secret. Maureen has recorded the little that she knows in a journal, which, as per her instructions, should remain unread for 25 years after her death. It is all upended during the week that Frida is home.
Click on the links for details:
https://argobookshop.ca/events/43927 https://www.ticketsource.us/argo-bookshop/t-lnggroo
H. NIGEL THOMAS' OFFICIAL WEBPAGE 