The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

Sabine Harwood comes to Trinidad reluctantly as a naive newlywed with her husband George. They never intended to stay but George falls in love with the place. Their arrival coincides with the launch of the PNM, the new Trinidadian national party. The novel opens with a violent police beating. It is 2006 - George and Sabine are in their seventies and out of love, and Trinidad is beset by gang violence and teeters on the edge of dictatorship. The beating fuels Sabine's loathing of Trinidad and inspires George to set about winning back her affections. But he makes a discovery about a secret at the heart of their relationship - a discovery that leads him to try to make amends, with tragic consequences. Time shifts to the couple's arrival in 1956, when George and Sabine are young, beautiful and crazy in love, and Trinidad is an idyllic expat paradise, and the narrative traces the events that have shaped the couple's ultimate destiny and contemporary Trinidad.