The Murderer

'For me life hasn't got dreams, success and all that damn nonsense. Life is full of shadows- some of them soft and others conceal a hammer.' Galton Flood is a lonely man. Ill at ease with his family, he leaves his home in Guyana's capital, Georgetown, for the remote township of Linden, where he moves through a string of precarious jobs, from diamond mining to cutting logs. Meeting Gemma, his landlord's daughter, appears to offer a first chance at meaningful connection. Yet Galton cannot escape his past, and begins a fatal descent into jealousy, paranoia and ultimately violence. What happens when we reach our lowest, and keep falling? With this haunting portrait of a mind unravelling, celebrated Guyanese writer Roy Heath evocatively recreates the country of his youth- its rivers, townships and tenement yards, and the tensions shimmering below the surface of a community.