Meet Mary Fellows, a sex-worker organizing a demonstration on St Catherine Street; how can she make the Anglican dean support it? . . . Disappointment follows disappointment as Margaret tries to find a suitable man; her latest folly is the suave younger man she brought over from Jamaica; . . . Greta, a domestic help, proudly holds up her son's high school diploma; but can he read it? . . .

These stories from Montreal present a gallery of characters, Caribbean immigrants desperate and triumphant, always struggling against the odds, as they make their way through the maze of urban life.

Lives breaks the stereotypes to give us a side of Canada rarely acknowledged.

H[ubert] Nigel Thomas grew up in St Vincent and the Grenadines but moved to Montreal in 1968. He is the author of 11 books and dozens of essays. His novels Spirits in the Dark and No Safeguards were shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize. Des vies Cassées (the translation of Lives: Whole and Otherwise) was shortlisted for le Prix Carbet des Lycéens. He holds the 2000 Professional of the Year Jackie Robinson Award, the 2013 Université Laval’s Hommage aux créateurs, and the 2020 Black Theatre Workshop’s Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. The Canadian High Commission to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States deems him to be one of Canada’s outstanding immigrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines. His books Behind the Face of Winter and Lives: Whole and Otherwise have been translated into French.

H. Nigel Thomas' profile page

"In Thomas' hands the interior monologue becomes a powerful tool for voicing character and experience. Time and again he demonstrates his skill at reproducing the speech patterns of characters with Caribbean origins to mesmerizing effect. . . . the stories contained in Lives Whole and Otherwise are all about shaking one frame or another. H Nigel Thomas gives voice to a hard social reality that refuses the glib formulas of traditional narrative form." --The Rover