Sugar Cage

The stunning debut of an award-winning writer, SUGAR CAGE tells the tale of two white families & the two black women who counterpoint & underpin their lives. Married on the same day, by the same judge, they have been neighbours - best friends & best enemies - since meeting on their honeymoons on Florida's north-east coast. Rose & Eudora are marked - nearly destroyed - by their consuming love for their husbands, while Charlie & Junior are haunted by their pasts, both real & imagined. It falls to Emory Looney, exiled by his angry father to the harsh discipline of the sugar-cane fields, to grow to love the sensual mysterious Soleil Marie Beauvoir, Haitian migrant worker & voodoo mambo. Right at the start, Inez Temple saw the sugar cage at the bottom of Rose Looney's glass, its deceiving bars glittering like white sand under the sun. Was there, she wondered, a way to dissolve that sugary curse? 'Connie May Fowler has written a first novel to send everyone else back to the pencil sharpener ... she writes with tenderness of eye & an ear extraordinarily attuned to the cadence of language', Kathryn Mead, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH