Set in a leper colony on an unnamed equatorial island our narrator struggles with delirium and memory as he chronicles his state. He is fascinated by a strange cast of characters as they live out their destinies towards the grave, pursued by music, dance and song. Desire and redemption entwine like snakes as his companions invent charmed pasts, as with Minstrel Joe’s tales of jamming with dead blues legends.

Part prose poem, part journal, part cri du coeur, part meditation on the last things, The Colony is a novella that stands intransigently beyond history and time, assembling a polyglot dramatis personae of outcasts. There is an urgent poetry and profundity in this book, but at its heart, floundering against the odds, there is the struggle to live.