The A List edition of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s enduring novel, a raw, unsentimental story of life in a small Caribbean community. Featuring a new introduction by David Chariandy

Set in the Eastern Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.

Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of courage.

Harold Sonny Ladoo was born and grew up in Trinidad. Like many writers of his generation, he went abroad, emigrating to Canada in 1968, where he published No Pain Like This Body. Shortly afterwards, in 1973, Ladoo died an untimely and violent death on a visit home to Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad. He was 28. Ladoo's novel Yesterdays appeared posthumously in 1974.

Harold Sonny Ladoo's profile page

David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His novel Soucouyant has received great attention, including a Governor General's Literary Award nomination for Fiction, a Gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Novel, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. His most recent novel, Brother, won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Fiction.

David Chariandy's profile page

While being trained as a Shakespearian actor through Caroline Tomas’s Total Theatre Lab in NYC, DAMIAN SALANDY enjoyed an eight-year career as a stage actor. He then served in the United States Navy from 2000 to 2007, first as an Electricians Mate third class then switching to aviation as an Aviation Structural Mechanic. After being honorably discharged, he decided to move back to Trinidad to be closer to his family. He enjoyed an illustrious nine-year career as a television news-weather producer and announcer for CCN TV6 in Port-of-Spain; the capital city of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. While still working for TV6, he discovered and cultivated an interest in voice acting and audiobook producing, making it his full-time occupation in 2016.

Damian Salandy's profile page