Dry Bone Memories

With protean virtuosity, Cecil Foster is back on the Canadian publishing scene with an extraordinary novel of love and risk, of loss and redemption. As Dry Bone Memories opens, Edmund, the narrator, is flying away from Barbados and into an American witness protection program. He is driven by guilt and grief to try to understand how he has come to this pass, and the novel unfolds as layers of memory reveal the story. Edmund had always lived in the shadow of his older "brother" Jeffrey, a charming schemer who returns to the island from Canada with grand plans for wealth and power. Jeffrey's realization of wealth is tied into money laundering for the Colombian druglords and his misguided belief that wealth creates freedom begins a spiral of entrapment and corruption that no one can escape. For a while, however, it seems to those that love and trust him that Jeffrey can outsmart the cartel and extract what the island needs from the wages of sin without exacting the price. Five star hotels are built, banking centres established and jobs created. The sugar cane fields lie fallow and memories of slave labour fade. Jeffrey has always had the magic - he is keeping the island one step ahead of the devil. But, evil cannot be kept in a box. And Jeffrey's magic cannot hold. (2001)