Kind of Eden

Amanda Smyth is Irish/Trinidadian. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 2000. Her short stories have been published in New Writing, London Magazine, and broadcast on Radio 4 as part of a series called Love and Loss. Her first novel, Black Rock [9781846687020], was published by Serpent's Tail in 2009.

A Kind of Eden is plotted like a thriller and reads like literature of the highest quality. Amanda Smyth shows how easy it is for a white foreign man to get lost in a small intensely mixed society, a society men like him once had a hand in creating. Every page in this novel feels eerie and uncomfortable - it touches on difficult truths about love, sex and crime in the twenty-first century Caribbean -- Monique Roffey Praise for Black Rock: 'Brilliant... It was so atmospheric, I had to read it in one sitting -- Lorraine Kelly A tremendously compelling novel. The West Indies may look like an advertisement for paradise, but it is only tourists who call it a paradise. Amanda Smyth opens a window onto the problems faced by Trinidad, and combines a knuckle-whitening thriller with a thoughtful meditation on exile, homeland and belonging. Pages of great lyric beauty combine with a deadly accuracy of phrase and observation; Smyth is a gifted writer and we are lucky to have her. -- Ian Thomson, author of THE DEAD YARD Amanda Smyth is a hugely talented storyteller. In A Kind of Eden, she has written an exquisite novel of fear, loss and acceptance. With Trinidad and Tobago as the setting, the prose is sometimes luscious and exotic; sometimes stark and, almost, unbearably tense. The whole thing ripples with beauty and menace as Smyth draws us deeper into the complex lives of her characters. What begins as the tale of a man in mid-life crisis, ends up packing a shocking and sinister punch. -- Mez Packer On the very first page the quality of the writing grabbed me, and I spent the whole day reading it with the greatest pleasure. A novel really does have to be the real thing to do that to me, and this is -- Diana Athill Smyth is excellent on Trinidad's underbelly of casual violence, and she uses it to good effect here, refreshing an old tale of a middle-aged man leaving his wife and child for a younger, more attractive woman, and turning it very quickly into something else: a revenge tale for a father whose daughter is hurt. -- Lesley McDowell Herald Smyth takes you under the skin of the place, evoking the sights, smells, sounds and colours so that you can feel it on your skin. Beautiful. -- Kate Saunders Times