Chinese Women

Uniquely pairing Caribbean grievances with political Islam, this intriguing novel begins as a sad story of unrequited love but descends into the nightmare world of a stalker. Told through the eyes of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the story opens with his boyhood memory of falling from a tree and being badly injured, after which he developed an obsessive attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong, who lived on the same sugar estate. Now, years later, Aziz lives in Canada and has become a highly paid engineer in the nuclear industry. Although he has a new life in a different country, Aziz still nurtures racial resentments about the way he was treated as a child on the sugar estate and has become a supporter of radical Islam. He also begins to fixate again on Alice and tracks her down. He finds that she is divorced and living in England and asks her to marry him. Though Aziz is telling the story, it is clear that Alice's apprehension is slowly mounting as she fears the violence that will occur if she turns him down.