Azucar : a novel

Azúcar is set on a fictional Spanish-speaking Caribbean island and traces the stories of two residents with differing connections to the land. Exploring what it means to belong to a place, Azúcar is a narrative replete with music and invention. Both satire and romance, it is the work of a prose stylist of the highest order.

Azúcar is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music.

Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of a USSRs-inspired political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from imperialist USAs. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to life in Fumaz. He must find some way of rescuing the island’s famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the island’s unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size.

This is a novel of ideas – how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? – but it is love and death, harmony and conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this zany narrative whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.

''Extraordinary.'' -Monique Roffey