A network of tunnels runs beneath Baxter’s Beach, the Bajan backdrop to Cherie Jones’s debut novel, shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Monsters lurk within – monsters such as the one in the cautionary fable told to 13-year-old Lala by her grandmother, about a girl who loses an arm after refusing to heed the warnings. Lala doesn’t listen either or, rather, she does, but the story ignites in her a contrary desire to search out dark places, ultimately propelling her into the arms of Adan, a hulking thief who beats her.
It’s all a far cry from the paradise depicted in travel magazines and tensions between wealthy tourists and impoverished locals come to a head at the very start of the novel, when a man is shot dead during a botched burglary at a beachfront villa. Soon after, a baby dies and a second murder investigation is opened. The hurt doesn’t end there, either: rape and incest also feature and even the innocuous and the wondrous become ominous. Rain and coconuts are “daggers” and “missiles”, childbirth “an injury”.
Domestic violence and trauma’s long reach are Jones’s focus and while they are explored largely through Lala’s relationship with Adan, she chops and changes between the viewpoints and backstories of characters, including a bungling, belly-led police detective, a Rasta gigolo burdened by his own unmentionable pain and the murdered man’s widow, a local girl made good – or at least rich.
This being the 1980s, shoulder-padded jumpsuits add colour to a narrative intensely flavoured with Bajan patois and local dishes (how about lentils with tarragon and coconut milk?), gospels and reggae. Jones’s fondness for repetition strikes an incantatory note but becomes claustrophobic, too, since the punches keep coming, explicitly detailed until language itself breaks down. “Slap. Gurgle. Choke” is how a later assault is described.
Its victim is once again Lala, still only 18 years old and named after a song by a mother she scarcely knew. Her mother’s story is sickeningly familiar but also, we discover, incomplete. Omitted is a moment of rebellion, of fighting back. Futile, since she still died at her husband’s hand and yet, in the context of this uncompromisingly clear-eyed novel, it almost passes for hope, a glimmer of light at the end of a labyrinthine tunnel.
• How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones is published by Tinder Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
