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In 1980s’ Réunion, monsters lurk beneath the surface of vibrant island life, ready to pounce at the slightest disturbance. ‘In the heat of the Tropic of Capricorn, on the flanks of an active volcano, the sharks would tear apart your favourite magazine if only they could crawl as far as your beach towel.’ Here, the naïve Dessaintes couple make a failing bid for happiness, soon growing jaded and bitter as the orange tree in their front yard – ‘the branches laden with flowers, the juicy oranges and, eventually, the nests of insatiable weaverbirds and the stench of rotten fruit.’ Even so, sprouting defiantly through the cracks of this postcolonial legacy of violence, poverty and intergenerational trauma, the Dessaintes’ daughter shows an irrepressible zest for life. Amidst the chaos raging behind and beyond the door of her childhood home, our young narrator stubbornly resists her parents’ refrain, ‘that’s the way it is and that’s that!’ Finding refuge in reading and determined to write her own story, she falls in love with words – ‘a group of jumbled black arabesques was dancing on a little white wall ... I worshipped them as sacred beings.’ With clear-eyed, offbeat, buoyant humour, Bélem plunges us into a vivid world of extremes where, ‘quiet times and places are rare.’