Two gay men with a lifetime of secrets face their insular, homophobic island's rancour.
Growing up in neighbouring villages on the tiny island nation of St. Vincent, teenage best friends Gordon and Allen are secret lovers until they are forced apart their community's traditional expectations and their fear of how others will react. They each complete their university studies abroad, encountering worlds where there is less hostility toward LGBTQ+ people. Tempted to stay, both men ultimately return home, hiding who they are.
Their secret lives come at the expense of others, and Gordon's wife, Maureen, is the first to be irreparably harmed. She has confided her secrets to an accusatory journal, and it is now up to Gordon to keep it from the local media and the unforgiving eyes of the authorities. If the truth is revealed, he and Allan will be the next victims.
About the Author :
H. Nigel Thomas is the author of thirteen books, comprising fiction, poetry, and literary criticism, and is the recipient of many awards, including the 2022 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. He is a Vincentian Canadian who lives in the Montreal suburb of Greenfield Park.
Review :
In Caribbean society, where homosexuality is often seen as a secret vice, this is a story of unflinching loyalty and genuine love. For years, Gordon has struggled to fulfill the role of husband and father, all the while longing to face society honestly. In this threatening atmosphere, instead the dénouement offers a revelation of courage and lucid humanism.
Dispassionate and yet profoundly engaged, employing a fraught double lens, A Different Hurricane is a generational saga in which emotions and their consequent behaviours are Category Five winds surging about an eye of enforced inauthenticity, causing catastrophic damage, shattering homes, destroying dreams. Superb at creating landscapes and fathoming the manners and mores of Caribbean island societies, master storyteller H. Nigel Thomas continues his decades-old project of exploring how gay men from small places risk life and limb to discover how to be themselves in the world.
H. Nigel Thomas guides us to the tempest’s deceptively calm eye, where each soul is revealed in subtle shades of light and dark and the faintest whispers of their human spirit heard.
While Caribbean queerness always looks and feels different to its Western counterparts, H. Nigel Thomas opens up once again the always emerging Caribbean-Canadian novel to his signature LGBTQ themes of community, family, spirituality and diaspora. A Different Hurricane’s significant departure in queer Caribbean writing lies in its exploration of queer aging with HIV/AIDS. Told from multiple points of view, A Different Hurricane offers a portrait of a queer protagonist — husband, father, friend, lover — never before seen in the pages of our literature.
Thomas writes with honesty, intelligence and compassion about the far-reaching damage wrought by repressive social laws and attitudes about sexual choice. His focus is intimate, his scope universal, his prose specific and sensually evocative. Even as he describes the strictures that cripple his characters’ choices, his love for the rhythms and sounds of life in St. Vincent shines through. A Different Hurricane is his most poignant and compelling novel yet.
In this powerful novel, H. Nigel Thomas reminds us that shame is an outcome of an intolerant society, but friendship, forgiveness, and ultimately, love are choices that each of us has the power to make. A Different Hurricane, with its examination of love between mature black gay and bisexual men, is reminiscent of James Baldwin’s masterpiece Just Above My Head and Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman.
H. Nigel Thomas’s novel shines unsparing light on a hypocritical society where reputation can make or break a person’s career and where public disclosure of homosexuality can lead to physical violence and social ostracism.
Nigel Thomas’ A Different Hurricane is a beautiful, brutal book about love in all its complexity – more than a story of one man’s lies and their consequences. It is a generational saga, excavating the layers of trauma that build up in a family, and how that trauma so often contributes to, and culminates in, tragedy.
