Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs: Selected Short Stories, 1970-2000

The stories in this collection have as their core the motion of travel, primarily from Montserrat to Britain, but also to continental Europe. For Markham, the drawing room is both the repository of memories and of family network, and the refuge of a West Indian from a society that had its own social graces in a Britain that harbors the stereotype that nothing of value has been brought to the country. Each of the stories has its own crafted completeness, whether in the observant humor of “The Pig Was Mine,” the bleakness of “Skeletons,” the audacious mythologizing of “A Short History of St. Cesaire,” or the absurdist magical realism of “Digging.” But within the great variety of tone, there are recurrences of character, alter egos, and location.

E. A. Markham was born in Montserrat in 1939 and migrated to England in 1956. He is the author of several collections of poetry and of the novel Marking Time, and was the editor of the Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories. He is professor of creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University in England.