Suspended sentences

by Mark A. McWatt

"Back in 1966, each of a group of Guyanese sixth-formers is 'sentenced' to write a short story that reflects their newly independent country. Years later, Mark McWatt, one of the group, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned, in the interior. The papers contain some of the stories written before the project collapsed. As a tribute to Victor, McWatt decides to collect the rest of the stories from his friends." "Whether written by their youthful or adult selves, the stories reveal not only their tellers and the Guyana most of them have left, but offer an affectionately satirical take on Guyanese fiction making. Amongst the stories, we read about the sexual awakening of a respectable spinster by a naked bakoo in a jar; an expedition into the Guyanese interior that turns into a painful homoerotic encounter; a schoolboy who is projected into an alarming science fiction future; and about an academic (in a brilliantly tragicomic story)