How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
SynopsisPlot
In Baxter’s Beach, Barbados, Lala’s grandmother Wilma tells the story of the one-armed sister. It’s a cautionary tale, about what happens to girls who disobey their mothers and go into the Baxter’s Tunnels. When she’s grown, Lala lives on the beach with her husband, Adan, a petty criminal with endless charisma whose thwarted burglary of one of the beach mansions sets off a chain of events with terrible consequences. A gunshot no one was meant to witness. A new mother whose baby is found lifeless on the beach. A woman torn between two worlds and incapacitated by grief. And two men driven into the Tunnels by desperation and greed who attempt a crime that will risk their freedom – and their lives.
Story
About this book
In Baxter's Beach, Barbados, Lala grows up hearing her grandmother Wilma tell the story of the one-armed sister, a warning about daughters who ignore their mothers and enter the Baxter's Tunnels. As an adult, Lala lives on the same shore with her husband Adan, a small-time criminal with easy charm. His interrupted burglary of a beachfront mansion begins a chain of events with severe consequences.
Four lives intersect: a gunshot without an intended witness, a newborn found lifeless at the water's edge, a woman divided between two worlds and stalled by grief, and two men whose need and greed lead them underground into the Tunnels. Jones sets these against the distance between the island's tourist image and the lives lived at its edges. The grandmother's tale runs alongside the present-day story, linking childhood warnings to adult harm.
The book moves between the households of the beach and the mansions rented by visitors, holding the word paradise at a distance. Cherie Jones is a Barbadian writer. Barbados itself is built largely of coral limestone, a soft rock that water carves into caves and passages, so tunnels belong to the island's real geology.
