The A List edition of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s enduring novel, a raw, unsentimental story of life in a small Caribbean community. Featuring a new introduction by David Chariandy

Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.

Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.

Harold Sonny Ladoo was born and grew up in Trinidad. Like many writers of his generation, he went abroad, emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he published No Pain Like This Body. Shortly afterwards, in 1973, Ladoo died an untimely and violent death on a visit home to Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad. He was 28. Ladoo's novel Yesterdays appeared posthumously in 1974.

Harold Sonny Ladoo's profile page

David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His novel Soucouyant has received great attention, including a Governor General's Literary Award nomination for Fiction, a Gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Novel, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. His most recent novel, Brother, won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Fiction.

David Chariandy's profile page