Told through a distinctive range of individual voices, Rhoda Bharath s stories of contemporary Trinidad visit the domestic and public spaces of a country moving too fast between the knowing innocence of its past and the experience of a globalized present. Caught in the antagonisms of race, class, and gender, the violence that comes with the trade in cocaine, and an Anancy politics where government power is the means to personal wealth made secure by favors to one s ethnic supporters, Bharath s characters are often engaged in a struggle to balance a desire for meaning and self-worth with the temptations of survival by any means. Bharath brings a bold, prophetic voice of alarm over a world that seems to have lost its moral compass."