This is a book of short stories divided into two parts. Both parts set around the 1950s, the first stories take place in Trinidad and the second group in London. Each Trinidadian story rolls on into the next without pausing between anecdotes until the end of Part 1 and then Selvon tells his London stories in the same style, one unfolding into the next.
The Trinidad based stories include tales from a variety of settings in Trinidad (and one in Venezuela) but predominately they are about village life. Selvon conveys a strong sense of the poverty and isolation and often monotony of lives in these villages. Having said that, the richness of the vegetation, the juicy mangoes, the fish in the streams that he describes, creates the sense of a most beautiful place yet despite this the life of the ordinary person is clearly very tough. For me the Ways of Sunlight are the patches of amusement, pleasure or simply something different rippling across the scene of his characters.
In the London section, the world of the characters is also hard – they struggle with the cold weather, bad housing, lack of money, which are all clearly described, and racism which is touched on more often by implication than overtly. However, I came away with a picture of young men full of energy, hope and initiative, finding ways to overcome difficulties including many of their own making. This set of stories was generally amusing, more so that the first section although the outcomes were often predictable.
I felt the sense of life in Trinidad and the sense of the Trinidadian life in London was well evoked and this was enhanced by the frequent use of Trinidadian dialect in both speech and in narration. I am not usually a great lover of short stories, so as much as my interest in Trinidad was aroused and as much as the escapades of youth in London amused me, the collection did not really draw me in … until I reached the end.
The final story, “My Girl and the City” which describes the narrator’s courting of his girlfriend, his love of London and his struggles with writing, is my favourite story in the book. There I found some beautifully expressive phrases:
“I heard my words echo in caverns of thought, as if they hung about like cigarette smoke in a still room …”
“…her skirt skylarking…” (in the wind)
“…the rain falling slantways and carefree and miserable.” – to give just a few examples.
I also enjoyed his references to dating in the “old days”. Selvon writes of taking the night bus “after seeing my girl home.” On another occasion, waiting for hours for his girlfriend, trying and failing to call her on a pay phone and eventually she turns up three hours late,
“She never expected that I would still be waiting, but she came on the offchance. I never expected that she would come, but I waited on the offchance.”
So the final story turned the book from a pleasant read to one full of appreciation, and has left me wanting to read “The Lonely Londoners”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this. I had heard of Sam Selvon and The Lonely Londoners but not this one. It’s a collection of stories and I really enjoyed it. Some of the stories are in Trinidad and other countries and some are in London. Some use dialect and although it took me a few pages to get the rhythm, the writing is beautiful and poetic and I read it with a lilt having no idea what Mr Selvon would sound like ~ or his characters.

The first story of love across the miles was very well done, how we can overcome many hurdles if we truly believe and want to. Then we were in Venezuela getting false documents for travel. But the stories in London were really moving. In one, we have unscrupulous landlords letting rooms to ‘the blacks’ so the ‘decent white folk’ would move out and the landlord evict the black tenants and then put the rents up. There’s a lot going on in these stories and a lot to think about. I will read more from the author.

I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley

A vivid collection of short stories, full of personality, based in Trinidad and London after WWII. The stories move from one to another seamlessly, you almost miss the moment when you are suddenly transported into a new narrative, but the tone often did shift enough to make it clear. The stories are a snapshot into lives in two distinct, but crucially linked places. The blunt change in climate, and the shift from the largely rural to the heavily urban environment, create the backdrop of the cultural distinctions between the two locations where the stories are set. People move between the locations, building lives for themselves, creating community.

Selvon writes with vibrancy and humour, and while the short nature of many of the stories left them feeling unfinished, the narratives weave together for a cohesive and interesting collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this edition.

Ways of Sunlight is divided into two parts: sun and light - first part is set in the Caribbean, Trinidad, and the second part is set in London.
It is a collection of beautifully written stories.
The different locations reflect different moods and themes.
Eraser's Dilemma was my favourite.
Sam Selvon's craft is, to say the least, interesting, and I will sure revisit this collection.

A lilting, hazy collection of stories and ephemeral moments, split between Trinidad and London, the two crucial locations of Selvon's life. And the disparate elements of each place clash and combine in fascinating ways throughout. The sunshine and peaceful lackadaisical edge to much of the first half is offset by the cold, grey bitterness of London, but in both halves of Ways of Sunlight emerges a fondness for community, on either sides of the sea, and a quality to both places that crystallise them in our minds. One is not considered better than the other or vice versa, and I found this approach exceedingly interesting.

I did find that the fragmented style was a little hard to follow at times, though how much this is owing to the author, and how much to the formatting of this edition, was not always clear. That each story slid so unnoticeably into the next was, then, a positive and a negative in my eyes. But overall this was a moving and engaging set of tales from an author I am only growing more and more fond of.

This is a short stories collection set in Trinidad and London.

Sam Selvon’s exuberant writing is evident throughout, with the humour, dreams, and disappointments of everyday human life, wherever you live.

If you have read The Lonely Londoners you will recognise themes, of loneliness, of loss, of love, of kindness but also, throughout, our shared common humanity. The tone of the writing is, somehow, forgiving.

Very well written and highly recommended. I read a copy provided by the publishers through NetGalley but my views are my own.

First, thank you to Penguin Press and NetGalley for the digital ARC.
It's a fine book, but I couldn't get into it as much as I'd liked.
I liked the first story and the last one the most. Brackley and Obeah were also of note, but others came and went so quickly that I remember nothing of them.
Selvon's good, though. He's got something about him. Want to read The Lonely Londoners next.

I read Sam Selvon's Windrush classic The Lonely Londoners long enough ago that 'Windrush' wasn't automatically followed by 'scandal', and keep meaning to read the sequels - one of which I have in an original eighties paperback whose colourful sitcom cover is fascinatingly far from the monochrome respectability which swathes modern editions of his work. Including this, a collection of his short stories, which jumps the queue on account of being from Netgalley. It's divided into two sections, Trinidad and London, and the temptation is to add 'much like Selvon's life', but one of the most noticeable things for me in the Trinidad section was the variety of voices, an overseer's resentful account in formal English followed by shorter tales in various flavours of local lingo. Which, more than the novels, is a handy reminder for the reader to guard against that temptation to treat writers who aren't well-off white guys as necessarily more autobiographical. For the most part, these stories are fine, but firmly within the expected compass of post-colonial literature, slices of life which are far livelier than short stories where a Midwestern housewife or Hampstead intellectual has a minor realisation about their life, but not necessarily any more substantial. The exception is the first and longest, Johnson And The Cascadura, which strikes the collection's most tragic note, the normal round of rural life disrupted by the arrival of a gullible European folklorist. Which, taken together with the way the London stories, even the daftest squibs among them, feel like they're operating on another level, is almost enough to make one believe that dubiously sourced line about how there are only two stories - someone goes on an adventure, and a stranger comes to town. In London, Selvon's new arrivals are often living in a shoestring in shitty apartments, but while the cold weather and early nightfall are soul-sapping, unignorable, there's seldom any sense of systemic oppression on the part of the 'Nordics' - even in a story such as Obeah In The Grove, which is explicitly about racist landlords, it's played more as chancers trying to get one over on their existing tenants, and then on the West Indian protagonists, only for the latter to turn the tables. More often, it's not even that so much as stories driven by characters with an eye to the main chance and others who either go one better or get carried along in their wake, mostly with comical consequences; that cover really doesn't do much to convey how often I found myself thinking of a forerunner to Only Fools And Horses.

Also, living out on that fringe of London myself, I was doubly amused by the consternation of Brackley in Waiting For Auntie To Cough when he sees the station names Gypsy Hill, Penge West, Forest Hill from the train window and is sure they must have left the city far behind. Not to mention learning from Working The Transport that the 196, which now stops at Elephant & Castle, used to make it all the way to Tufnel Park.

By the final piece, My Girl And The City, even an accommodation with the weather has been reached. I don't know whether the events described ever happened quite this way, but more than anything else here it feels less story than essay, and less either than the monologue from a St. Etienne album track (which, to be clear, is from me high and rare praise). It shares with that first and longest story a melancholy that's absent from most of the collection, and I wonder if I'm falling into that old, foolish privileging of tragedy over comedy by calling them the best things here. Maybe better say that they have a hard-won wisdom, and the stories in between have an enormous sense of life, and aren't those both qualities worth celebrating?

A really striking and enjoyable collection of short stories. A distinctive voice and very engaging. Shines a new light on Selvon's work.