With protean virtuosity, Cecil Foster is back on the Canadian publishing scene with an extraordinary novel of love and risk, of loss and redemption. As Dry Bone Memories opens, Edmund, the narrator, is flying away from Barbados and into an American witness protection program. He is driven by guilt and grief to try to understand how he has come to this pass, and the novel unfolds as layers of memory reveal the story. Edmund had always lived in the shadow of his older "brother" Jeffrey, a charming schemer who returns to the island from Canada with grand plans for wealth and power. Jeffrey's realization of wealth is tied into money laundering for the Colombian druglords and his misguided belief that wealth creates freedom begins a spiral of entrapment and corruption that no one can escape. For a while, however, it seems to those that love and trust him that Jeffrey can outsmart the cartel and extract what the island needs from the wages of sin without exacting the price. Five star hotels are built, banking centres established and jobs created. The sugar cane fields lie fallow and memories of slave labour fade. Jeffrey has always had the magic - he is keeping the island one step ahead of the devil. But, evil cannot be kept in a box. And Jeffrey's magic cannot hold. (2001)

CECIL FOSTER was born in Barbados and immigrated to Canada in 1978. He has been a reporter for The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the Financial Post and has contributed to such magazines as Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Toronto Life, NOW and Canadian Business. He has also worked for the CBC (in radio and television) and CTV and is a regular commentator in the national media. He has published five works of non-fiction and four novels, including his highly praised debut, No Man in the House. Currently, Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Guelph and is director of graduate studies in the department of transnational studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Independence is his first novel in almost twelve years.

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