by The Booker Tea

Salt

“Using language that’s as lush as the foliage of Trinidad and dialogue as vivid as the Caribbean, Lovelace creates a parable that applies to any nation struggling with unresolved racial issues and to any people struggling to free themselves from their past.” – Publishers Weekly

cover art for Salt

by Earl Lovelace

Paperback (Persea Books)
ISBN 978-0-89255-235-1
260 pages

Guinea John, mythical ancestor of Black people in Trinidad, put two corncobs under his armpits and flew away from the scene of his enslavement, back to Africa. But his descendants, having eaten salt, were too heavy to fly and would not follow….

One hundred years after official Emancipation, the diverse people of Trinidad—Africa, Asian, and European—still have not settled into the New World. Two men set out to free them from “old captivities” and to welcome them to their island homeland. Around them swirl a cast of unforgettable men and women, each telling his own story in his own voice, each striving with passion and wit to make sense of life in a still-young country where the roles of enslaved and landowner still linger, but “the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom.”

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize

“A novel confident in its rhythms, in the authority of its selling, driven by an exultant compassion for its characters.” —Derek Walcott

“[Lovelace’s] generous, torrential prose…seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.” —The New York Times Book Review

About the author

Earl Lovelace (born July 13, 1935, in Toco, Trinidad) is a celebrated West Indian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright known for vividly portraying West Indian life and culture. His writing blends Trinidadian dialect with standard English to explore themes of postcolonial identity, social change, and the tension between rural and urban life.

Raised by his grandparents in Tobago, Lovelace worked as a forest ranger, civil servant, and journalist before pursuing literature. He later studied and taught in both Trinidad and the U.S., earning an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. His acclaimed works include While Gods Are Falling (1965), The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), The Wine of Astonishment (1982), and Salt (1996), which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. In 2012, his novel Is Just a Movie received the Trinidad and Tobago National Literature Prize. Beyond novels, he’s authored short stories, essays, plays like “Jestina’s Calypso,” and screenplays, exploring themes of community, cultural resilience, and Caribbean identity formation after independence. The University of the West Indies awarded him an honorary doctorate for his five-decade contribution to Caribbean literature.

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