Passiontide

Finalist for the CARICON Prize

When a female musician is found murdered on a small tropical island, after a string of similar deaths, outraged local women take matters into their own hands.

The quiet calm of Ash Wednesday morning. Carnival is over. Everyone on the small island of St. Colibri is sleeping peacefully. Everyone except Sora Tanaka, a young pan player lying under the cannonball tree. Sora, a professional musician, had been visiting St. Colibri to take part in the island’s famous steel pan competition. But Sora isn’t asleep; she’s dead: brutally murdered, and still in her costume. And as the women of this island know all too well, Sora is far from the first woman to be killed, and she probably won’t be the last, either. In fact, the problem of women being killed on the island is so bad, there’s even a dedicated unit within the police department: OMWEN, the Office for Murdered Women, headed by Inspector Cuthbert Loveday. 

    In this powerful new rewriting of the detective novel, Sora’s death is the last straw and the beginning of something much larger, a "revolution" some are calling it. The event draws together four women who have never before seen each other as allies: a friend of the victim, the organizer of a sex workers’ collective, a local activist, and the prime minister’s wife. Tenderly, sometimes hilariously, Passiontide chronicles how these women join forces and find new ways to help one another.

MONIQUE ROFFEY is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of eight books, five of which are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean region. The Mermaid of Black Conch, her previous novel, won the Costa Book of the Year award. She co-founded Writers Rebel inside Extinction Rebellion. She was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and lives in the East End of London.