Stranger at the Gate

Stranger at the Gate is a 1956 novel by John Hearne set in a colonial Caribbean country in the post-war years. It has the narrative drive of a Hemingway novel, the ominous sense of fate of classical Greek tragedy, a sensuous appreciation of a landscape, domestic interiors, and food that draws on Hearnes own Jamaica, and an acute portrayal of the white and light-brown landed and commercial elite. The stranger is a revolutionary leader escaping from certain death in a Francophone Caribbean state that has suffered a counter-coup aided by the big state to the north. Roy McKenzie, a lawyer, a light brown man of elite background, has the dangerous task of hiding the escaped Etienne and then getting him off the island to be picked up by a passing Polish ship. He sets in train a sequence of events that test the boundaries of the personal and the political in the deepest and most tragic ways.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 276 pages
\n Publication date: 29 October 2020
\n Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd
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Stranger at the Gate was originally published in 1956 by Faber and Faber,and is part of the Peepal Tree Caribbean Modern Classics series. The stranger is a revolutionary leader escaping from certain death in a Francophone Caribbean state that has suffered a counter-coup aided by the big state to the north. As a leading member of a small communist party in the imagined state of Cuyuna, Roy McKenzie,has the dangerous task of hiding the escaped Etienne and then getting him off the island to be picked up by a passing Polish ship. McKenzie,a lawyer,a light brown man of elite background,radicalised by his wartime experiences,has to acknowledge that his partys roots among the black working class are very shallow,and that his only hope of helping Etienne is to turn to his friends among the very elite he is supposedly committed to destroy. When he involves his oldest friend,Carl Brandt,and the woman who becomes his lover,in his mission,he sets in train a sequence of events that test the boundaries of the personal and the political in the deepest and most tragic ways.

\n Weight: 342g\n
Dimension: 136 x 205 x 28 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781845234546\n
Edition number: New ed\n