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A Shadow in Yucatán

by Philippa Rees

116 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); contains black and white photographs; catalogue #06-1520; ISBN 1-4120-9764-9; US$15.65, C$18.00, EUR12.86, £9.00

Recapturing the dying sixties; peopled by the voices of her generation, Stephanie walks from pregnancy to pain through the world of betrayed promises.

Remember Bob Dylan and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’? He walked these same streets to a bar in Coconut Grove before his guitar was amplified. Remember Joan Baez and Woodstock? Recall the flowers in the rifle barrels and the braziers of Aldermarston? What about Mary Quant, and Abbey Road? If you remember those, then this book is for you. You will not find them full-bodied, they are long gone, but their spirit is the paper on which this tale is spilt. It will remind you, and help your children to know the country of your past, and why you sometimes seem disappointed.

This distilled novel fits no category: It is not exactly fiction because the story is true in essence, truer as myth; it is not poetry as such, there are too many insistent voices; it is not history although its place and time are past. It is simply experience singing a song, to the ears and eyes of memory.

It recaptures the optimism of innocence when all things still seemed possible; before the dreams surrendered to the grey men in grey suits. It tells Stephanie’s story but her story is also the story of that golden time. It may make you cry for the self you once were, and if it does it will make you glad.

Philippa Rees grew up in Southern Africa, where as an only child she accompanied her grandfather on safaris inspecting African schools in remote territories for weeks at a time. Something of that experience colours all her writing; solitude is explored through most of her characters, whether through their inner spaces of courage, or the ostracism directed at unorthodox convictions. The lonely courage of the individual is what draws her, whether she is writing novels, poetry, plays, or science.

As a writer her greatest support came from a pen friend she never met, an eminent translator and literary critic, in whose memory this book is affectionately inscribed.

Married with four adult daughters, after sojourns in Mozambique, Germany and Florida, she now lives in Somerset, England. Between constant writing she has converted a collection of barns to provide a performing space for young classical musicians, whose struggle to communicate is another kind of loneliness.

DIY in spades might be her flippant way of summing up.

Excerpts

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