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No Pain Like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo
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No Pain Like This Body

The forgotten classic masterpiece of Trinidadian literature
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Narrator Damian Salandy

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Length 4 hours 21 minutes
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

With an introduction by Monique Roffey - this is her favourite book by a
Trinidadian novelist.

Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.

Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.

'A masterpiece of hurt' The New York Times

ยฉ Harold Sonny Ladoo 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Harold Sonny Ladoo (Author)
Harold Sonny Ladoo was born in Trinidad in 1945 and emigrated to Toronto in 1968 with his wife and two children. In 1972 he graduated from the University of Toronto and his first novel, No Pain Like This Body, was published, earning Ladoo immediate recognition as a new literary talent. The following year he returned to Trinidad to settle a land dispute but was murdered. He was just twenty-eight. His second novel, Yesterdays, was published posthumously in 1974.

Monique Roffey (Introducer)
Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in London. She is the author of seven novels and a memoir. The Mermaid of Black Conch won the Costa Book of the Year and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her other highly acclaimed books include Archipelago, which won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and House of Ashes. In addition to her work as an environmental activist, she is a professor of contemporary fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

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Reviews

It is a book whose enduring gift is that someone had the courage to write it, without illusions, beneath a black sky Rereading this book has given me the gift of seeing it not only as an ode to violence, as it has come to be characterized, but also as a compassionate work by its end. I am indeed in love with this book. I have read the book several times and it is my favourite novel written by a Trinidadian novelist hands down. It deserves to be known Luminous and harrowing Expand reviews
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