Four Taxis Facing North Format: Paperback

The stories that comprise Four Taxis Facing North reveal the contrasts of contemporary Trinidad. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw explores the lives of rich and poor Trinidadian families in anguish: a world of abandonment, unmet expectations and untenable secrets. In these landscapes, it is the women who suffer most, theirs an especially lonely position from which they look for escape. Like any other nation, Trinidad faces the threats of violence, drug abuse and corruption. But these issues become magnified in a small island setting. Named for the the title story, which envisions the island's problems exploding into anarchy, this collection offers a finely nuanced view of Trinidadian society where the legacy of colonialism echoes alongside the tensions of a nation at a crucial point in its history.

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her publications include a novel, Mrs. B, Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers (2012), co-edited with Nicole Roberts, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2004 (2008) and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks (1804-2004) (2006) co-edited with Martin Munro.