In Another Place, Not Here

Acclaimed by Adrienne Rich as "fierce, sensuous . . . a work of great beauty and moral imagination," In Another Place, Not Here tells of two contemporary Caribbean women who find brief refuge in each other on an island in the midst of political uprising. Elizete, dreaming of running to another place to escape the harshness of her daily life on the island, meets Verlia, an urban woman in constant flight who has returned to her island birthplace with hopes of revolution. Their tumultuous story moves between city and island, past and future, fantasy and reality. With all the lyrical intensity of a praisesong, Dionne Brand's luminous debut novel, In Another Place, Not Here, tells of two contemporary Caribbean women one urban, passionate, and idealistic, the other constrained by disillusion and rural poverty, each in her own spiritual exile who find brief refuge in each other on an island in the midst of political uprising. Elizete dreams of running to another place to escape the harshness of her daily life on the island. Knowing better than to hope for much, she lives in a world of lush inventions that stave off reality. Then she meets Verlia, a woman in constant flight, who lives in Toronto and has returned to her island birthplace with hope of revolution. Both women are dreaming of each other's reality and of each other. Their tumultuous story moves between city and island, between material and spiritual poverty, between fantasy and reality, in a past and future time where the dream is always, again, deferred.

Review :
Praise for Dionne Brand "Passionate in its attention to emotional nuance and visual detail, In Another Place, Not Here weds beauty and fierce intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review "Remarkable...Dionne Brand's debut novel reads with the urgent intensity of a wail that continues to echo." --The Washington Post Book World "A work of artistic boldness in both form and content...This is a must-read book." --Ms. "The remarkable poet Dionne Brand now gives us a fierce, sensuous novel of women in migration-political and emotional. Concrete and visionary as a dream, relentless as the history it reveals, In Another Place, Not Here is a work of great beauty and moral imagination." --Adrienne Rich "[Dionne Brand] creates a new language that fuses modernist tricks and tics (echoes of Faulkner and Woolf accumulate as the book progresses) with the suggestive speech of unlettered rural Trinidadians...Spectacular." --The Women's Review of Books "Brand has two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless ability to capture the flicker of experience... A stunning book." --Editor's Choice, Globe & Mail (Toronto) "A beauty that must be read to be believed...Brand combines folklore with poetry in a manner which recalls Michael Ondaatje. This book is one of the classics of our culture." --George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax) "Always turbulent, always golden and daring, with a strong touch of the poetic . . . that Dionne Brand manages to pull all this off makes her one of the best practitioners of contemporary fiction that I have read in the last ten years." --Austin Clarke, The Toronto Star