“…it’s rare to read a novel so ambitious, so tautly written, so able to survey a personal and historical landscape mired in horror and from it to divine otherworldly pathways that hint at the possibility of redemption.” Sukhdev Sandu, The Telegraph

GUYANESE-born David Dabydeen has completed his sixth novel, titled ‘Molly and the Muslim Stick’, published by Macmillan Caribbean Press.
The novel’s central character is Molly. She is raised in the harsh surroundings of Accrington, Lancashire, during the years leading up to World War Two.

Systematically abused by her father and his band of pals, becoming consummate in sex and hatred at an early age, she matures into a wounded and broken creature, half soothsayer, half madwoman: A creation to rival the fabulous beings of Guyanese myth.

“I’ve set the story at the time of the Suez crisis, which enables me to look with some distance and perspective at issues that are still relevant today – religious fundamentalism, the suffering of the Palestinians and the fear of the Israelis for their own survival,” Dabydeen told the Guardian of London.

As her life story unfolds, Macmillan says Dabydeen portrays an absurdist narrative peopled with talking animals, demented prophets, shape-shifting ghosts, Amerindian asylum seekers and a Muslim walking stick. Raleigh’s discovery of Guiana, the Suez Crisis, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the ‘clash of civilisations’ – much here resonates with the impulses of the Third World canon, yet David Dabydeen’s gentle insistence that only pity can cleanse away the crimes of history, and the magical transformations enacted by his jewelled and sumptuous prose, ensure the reader’s bewitchment throughout this rich and strangely wrought, marvellous tale of human suffering and redemption.

“…it’s rare to read a novel so ambitious, so tautly written, so able to survey a personal and historical landscape mired in horror and from it to divine otherworldly pathways that hint at the possibility of redemption.” Sukhdev Sandu wrote in The Telegraph about Molly and the Muslim Stick.

Dabydeen is a 2008 winner of the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence (Arts & Letters), which carried with it a prize of 40, 000 thousand Pounds Sterling.
The Guyanese author read English at Cambridge, and is currently Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

He has published five novels and three books of poems, including A Harlot’s Progress, Our Lady of Demerara and Turner. His work has been shortlisted for the James Tait Memorial Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Dublin Impac Prize, and has received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Guyana Prize and the Raja Rao Prize.