Swimming in the volcano

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Winner of the American Book Award for his collection of stories Easy in the Islands and the Prix de Rome for The Next New World, Bob Shacochis returns to the islands with a first novel possessed of the same beauty as the places and people of the Caribbean. The volcano at the heart of the island of St. Catherine has smoldered as ominously and impotently as its politics for years, but lately things seem to be heating up. Mitchell Wilson, an American expatriate and economist for the Ministry of Agriculture, becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially eruptive scene enters a woman, Johanna, whom Mitchell once loved and lost but who remains an enchanting and powerful temptation - one he will not resist. At once a beguiling love story and a superbly sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutally seductive a novel as the world it evokes. Triumphantly compassionate, and imbued with Shacochis's insight into human affairs that "ranks with the best of Conrad and Hemingway," here is a commanding performance by "one of the most talented young writers working in America today."