Suite As Sugar and Other Stories

by Camille Hernández-Ramdwar

Dundurn Press

Suite As Sugar and Other Stories

by Camille Hernández-Ramdwar

Dundurn Press

Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.

From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands.

Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being.

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This book may also be available at the TIFA Festival Bookstore.

Camille Hernández-Ramdwar is an author, scholar, and independent consultant. Her debut collection of short stories Suite as Sugar was published by Rare Machines/Dundurn Press in 2023. Her earlier work appeared in Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction; Mercury Retrograde; and “but where are you really from?”  Stories of Identity and Assimilation in Canada. Camille is Associate Professor Emerita at Toronto Metropolitan University where for over twenty years she engaged in teaching, writing, research and activism concerning anti-racism and Caribbean Studies in Canada. She divides her time between Toronto and Trinidad.

Read more about Camille Hernández-Ramdwar

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