Yesterdays

A rediscovered classic, Yesterdays turns colonialism on its head.

Originally published in 1974, Yesterdays is nominally the story of one mans attempt to launch a Hindu Mission from Trinidad to convert the heathen Christians of Canada. Yet this conceit quickly derails into a ribald, outrageous portrait of West Indian village life, and a prescient, proto-parody of what would become the archetypal immigrant story. Sacred cows both figurative and literal are skewered in a series of hilarious and increasingly bawdy encounters between villagers who gossip, cheat, and steal, but also form a balanced, if chaotic, collectivity.

Yesterdays is one of the great lost English-language novels of the previous centuryperhaps ahead of its own time upon its initial release, but sure to appeal to 21st-century audiences who will appreciate its startling prescience, linguistic inventiveness, as well as its bold singularity amid a canon glutted with paint-by-numbers respectability.