I very fascinating read!

A Different Hurricane follows Allan and Gordon as their childhood friendship blossoms into a romance, a romance the men will go to great lengths to hide from their homophobic, insular island country of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Both Allan and Gordon marry into lavender relationships in order to protect their relationship, but when Gordon's wife Maureen's health declines, her expository journal could uproot the lives of these four messily intertwined characters. Thomas explores a tapestry of love, family drama, Black Caribbean experience, deception, and survival.

The writing style felt somewhat clinical and scientific, and I found it built distance between myself and truly connected to the characters. While the characters were all well-flushed out and multidimensional, there was a liveliness missing from the characters that held them back from jumping off the page as real, breathing beings. I thoroughly enjoyed the multimedia narration style. Thomas did a fantastic job of shifting the vernacular between perspectives, especially as the narration shifted from dialogue to journal entries.

Such an interesting read, I just wish I could have connected more with the characters!

This is a well written and absolutely devastating story that I couldn’t put down. Knowing that this is very much a reality for many many queer people made this a compelling read and I think the topics were handled really well. It was touching and sad, a true insight into the struggles queer people may face.

I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately the premise is the only good thing about it. I do love the idea of this novel shedding light on the social and political situation of queer men in St. Vincent, but that is just about the only good thing I can say about it. Sadly, I found everything about it flimsy. Everything is exposition, with very little interiority. It’s a situation that invites nuance, emotion, and ambiguity, but it’s treated very simplistically. The dialogue isn’t believable; none of the characters are well developed; there are paragraphs upon paragraphs of poorly done exposition. I’m sad that I didn’t like this one, but I just found it to be a poorly crafted novel.

There seem to be two types of Caribbean queer stories - unhappy gay man gets killed in a homophobic attack or unhappy queer person immigrates to a 'Western' country and finds happiness. In A Different Hurricane, H. Nigel Thomas tries to do something different - to tell a story of an unhappy gay man who lives in the closet his entire life. The protagonist's sexuality defines many of the pivotal moments of his life, but at the end of the day, it is not the only thing happening in it. I do feel that the novel is a bit more interesting and complex than the blurb gives it credit for. Instead of a tried and tired story of a doomed lifelong love, Thomas writes a portrait of a prickly, sad, and largely unsympathetic man. Gordon has a relationship with his childhood best friend Allan, then gets his decoy girlfriend (who does not know she is a decoy) pregnant and gets bogged down in married life. Both Gordon and Allan have experiences of living abroad - in Canada and the UK respectively - but both choose to come back to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Their affair ends, but both continue pursuing relationships with other men. Gordon ends up contracting HIV and giving it to his wife, Madeleine. The novel is told primarily through Gordon's perspective, intermingled with extracts from Madeleine's diaries. Although always focused on the central narrative of Madeleine's experience of HIV, the novel is less about homosexuality and more about family relationships and gendered expectations in SVG.

Madeleine's chapters are much more engaging than Gordon's. We get more of a sense of her as a character, and what shaped her and her choices. The prose is also more enticing and lively. By contrast. Gordon's chapters are drab, lifeless and often thematically repetitive. Some critics point out that Gordon's part of the story falls a bit flat, and that his supposed doomed love story is never centre stage. We as readers get little sense of this looming love for Allan. I think it is deliberate, and makes for a more interesting novel. Gordon keeps telling himself that Allan was the love of his life, but there is very little in his narrative to corroborate that. Ultimately, Gordon is quite a sad person with little of a sense of romantic love for anybody, and his inability to develop such a deep feeling is shown by Thomas to be the result of the highly homophobic society he lives in. It is also interesting to see his repeated reluctance to leave SVG throughout the years. He always has an excuse, but the excuses never read like reasons. Gordon explains his choice to return to SVG after his first experience in Canada by his desire to be a good and present father to his daughter Frida, but, as we learn later, he could have taken Frida with him, he could have even taken Madeleine and Frida with him. Gordon is a man whose light completely left him, even if it had been there in the first place. Unlike Allan, he also does not pursue gay life in SVG, risky as it is, choosing instead to find partners during his extended work trips abroad (it was interesting to see Trinidad and Tobago represented as a gay and gay friendly destination for local travel).

Whilst the novel is more interesting and nuanced than the blurb and some of the more negative reviews might present it as, there were a couple of things that did not work for me. Gordon's chapters could have been edited down. The secondary characters come across as flat - Frida in particular never felt like an almost 40 year old woman, instead giving absent 20 something daughter living abroad. Gordon felt very disconnected from what was happening to LGBTQ+ rights and community in SVG. I understand that he is supposed to be closeted, but the narrative tells us that he followed gay related books and news, and whilst it is understandable that he would not have shared his thoughts with others, I would have expected his narration to share them with the reader. This disconnect feeds into a more general sense that there is little sense of place in this novel and SVG never comes to life in it. Similarly to many other queer books I've read, homophobia is presented as a binary, not a spectrum, and it is shown as something completely unchanged over the 40 or so years shown in the novel. In my experience of LGBTQ+ issues, especially across borders and cultures, often the level of what is considered homophobic in one culture would not be seen on the same level in another (just to be clear, both are still expressions of homophobia). In other words, there is a difference between 'burn all the gays' and someone making insensitive comments. In this novel, most of the sympathetic characters are presented as generally accepting. It would have been more interesting if, for example, Madeleine herself had a bit more of a complex reaction to her husband coming out as gay after he's given her HIV. There is sort of a hint at complicating this picture when we find out that Gordon's sister May, a very sympathetic feminist character, turns out to be a 'kill all the gays' type of homophobe, but that storyline is dropped and never elaborated upon.

Homophobia also becomes sort of a moral compass, which overrides other issues. For example, Gordon's White neighbour is nostalgic for the British Empire/British rule. I was actually interested to see a bit of a discussion of Caribbean whiteness there, not a subject many Caribbean writers discuss nowadays. But then he becomes the most ardent advocate of gay rights, as his (mixed-race) son is gay. He is also the most vocal supporter of gay rights in the story. Without extra discussion, contextualisation and nuance, a bad faith reading of this narrative can be easily translated into 'only White people can be truly queer friendly, and wanting the British back is good, actually, as it is good for the gays'. A more in-depth discussion of these issues would have benefitted the novel, replacing some of the more meandering parts of Gordon's chapters.

Overall, not a perfect novel by any means, but I think it is still worth engaging with and discussing, and it is a bit sad to see an almost total lack of buzz around it.

I enjoyed learning about queer people in St. Vincent. The story is a bit of a slow burn, but ultimately a well-told tale. After learning how the main character has spent his life, the resolution was particularly poignant and satisfactory. The author weaves fear, love, grief, and loyalty into a compelling story.

🌴A highly readable, though sad, story

4-4.5🌟 stars
I started off with a bit of confusion and a lot of characters and relationships introduced pretty rapidly, but then settled in to this sad narrative about life on a conservative Caribbean island and the double lives led by Gordon Wiley, the narrator, and his lifelong friend and former lover Allan. The women they marry as part of their masquerade as heterosexuals are unknowing participants in their act and all end up suffering. The author did a skillful job of portraying a microcosm of the attitudes of the islanders through the extended family, friends and neighbors of the main characters and the contrasting tolerance and freedom Gordon experiences during his sojourns to Canada.

Author H. Nigel Thomas builds the story from sixty-something Gordon's own thoughts and reflections and a manuscript that his wife Maureen drafted, to be kept secret and handed to their daughter Frida decades in the future, only after Maureen has been dead for 25 years. But Gordon has access to his wife's account, written after she had been diagnosed with HIV as a result of her husband's secret life, and shares it with the reader.

This novel resonated with me as I've lived in a few countries that echoed the attitudes identified here in St. Vincent. The descriptions of individuals, their lives and prejudices, felt authentic.

I'm glad I read A Different Hurricane and would recommend it as a thoughtful and realistic fictionalized account of societal pressures to condemn and sweep homosexuality under the carpet.

Thanks to Dundurn Press and NetGalley for sharing a complimentary advance copy of the book; this is my voluntary and honest opinion.

Review shared on Goodreads and Bookbub, and with Barnes & Noble, on 1/27/25. To be shared on kobo and Google Play when published.

Reading this book was a journey. 4.5 stars

The introduction of a large number of characters at the beginning of the book seemed a bit rush, often with little or no explanation of who the characters were, so I found myself floudering in the narrative for a while. For the majority of the book, i felt a disconnect from the characters. I empathized with the situations in which the characters found themselves but at times, it felt like a lecture about the political and cultural climate of St Vincent and Grenada rather than a story of the human condition.However, in retrospect, I wonder if this was reflective of how the characters themselves had to sometimes hold themselves at a distant from each other in order to survive.

I enjoyed the structure of the book with its alternating perspectives, especially that Maureen's story was told through her journal/memoir entries. It offered the intimacy that i found lacking at the beginning of the story.

I know very little about St Vincent and Grenada so appreciated reading a story set there as told by an author from the area.

In the end, although this was a difficult subject of which to read, I was invested in the story of Gordon, Maureen and Allan. The characters were developed and their thoughts and feelings were often revealed in small ways as the novel progressed. I may not have liked Gordon for most of the book but by the end, I had a better understanding for his behaviour towards and treatment of Maureen.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dundurn Press for a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book really gripped me from the start. It was so interesting to read a book set on St. Vincent, a place and culture I haven't seen much of. While I have read many a story related to queer oppression and AIDS, I almost never feel like I'm reading a copy-paste story. Especially, in this case since it's in more current times and takes place in the Caribbeans. The writing was really well done, though I was a tiny bit confused in the beginning, and I really appreciate the journal/memoir parts of the story that give the reader a different perspective on the story.

Why it's not a 5-star read is because of the last three pages. I really feel like it needed one more short chapter or an epilogue to fully round off the story, but maybe that's just me.

Overall, this was a great reading experience, a great start to the new year and I would recommend it to anyone.

An unexpected but captivating tale, telling a story that we rarely hear. The characters were well constructed and the authorial perspective let us know what we needed to know in good time but without making the narrative predictable.

This contemplative novel paints a tragic portrait, one where deceit is a vehicle for both self-preservation and self-destruction. It employs an interesting framing device, using a present-day, active storyline as the basis to explore memory, reflection, and the journal entries of a deceased wife. In this way multiple timelines weave in and out of each other, in some ways showing that even as things change they are not free of the past, whether that be the traumas we experience at the hands of a bigoted society or the traumas we inflict on others through our own types of emotional violence.

With that said, there is something about the writing that doesn’t work for me, personally. It feels very earnest but also almost academic, or distant. I appreciated the histories and depths of the characters, and especially appreciated how the dialogue would switch into vernacular depending on who was speaking and whether it was a memory vs. a journal entry, etc. But the writing didn’t leave me emotionally invested, even when I could see all the pieces of the story that should have been pulling me in. The dialogue often felt very formal, and in general I never experienced a comfortable flow with the writing. Because of this, even though the characters were well-rounded, it felt like a history lesson’s explanation of their various characteristics more than it felt like an invitation to know them.

This might just be a personal thing. The novel certainly gives a good sense of place, letting you understand the religious and social atmosphere of St. Vincent. So there is an interesting framing device combined with a good atmosphere. And the use of journal entries explores both sides of a story that we usually only get one side of, which was an interesting take. I struggled to feel invested in the characters in large part due to writing that I felt was holding me at arm’s length, but that may not be a problem for others.

(Rounded down from 2.5)

I want to thank the author, the publisher Dundurn Press, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Best friends, and erstwhile teenage lovers, Gordon and Allen, grow up on the homophobic island of St Vincent. They are both intelligent, and win scholarships to study abroad in countries where homosexuality is tolerated, and are able to form relationships with whomever they please. Yet both make the conscious decision to return to a home, where homosexuality is not only illegal, but viciously and violently discouraged.
The book mainly focusses on Gordon. Before he goes to university in Canada, he gets Maureen pregnant. She and their families insist that they get married, as the stigma against pregnancy outside of marriage and children born out of wedlock is so great on the island. Gordon, against his better judgement, is forced to agree. Thus, two people’s futures are decided – not by love, nor personal desire – but by the bigotry of their environment. Allen also marries a local woman, and the two ladies are best friends, though never seem to share what is really going on in their lives.
Gordon’s primary reason for returning to St Vincent is to take a full part in his daughter’s life. He wants to be the father to her, that he never had. Unlike many parents on the island, he will never beat his child, and makes sure that Maureen and their relations never do either. Likewise, he never beats his wife. They may not have had the happiest marriage - though that is not really dwelt on. When a disastrous situation arises, and he needs to confess to Maureen about having affairs with men, she stays with him, and does not mention it to anyone else, though writes about it in a diary to be handed to her best friend after her death. When they both become ill, Allen (now their doctor) gives them full support and medical aid, while keeping their secrets.
Later, another serious catastrophe arises – this time affecting Allen. Again, Gordon could leave the island, go somewhere more gay-friendly, and avoid the almost certain fallout. His wife has died, his daughter is full grown, independent, and living abroad. This time though, Allen needs him.
Why are homosexuals so often defined by their sexual preferences – as though they have no other sides to their personality – but straight persons seldom are. I believe, that for the vast majority of people, as they mature sex ceases to be the most important (or only) driving force. Coming out as gay often takes a lot of courage, but so sometimes does remaining in the closet. In both situations, one is ones own authentic self – defined by the decisions made or not made. We would all like to live in a place where our preferences are accepted – and that is the ideal. But, occasionally we have other priorities – family, friendship, career … And those priorities should also be respected.
St Vincent sounds like a nightmare – not just for LGTBQ+ people, but also for women. Violence is everywhere. Most men seem to be cheating on their wives. Yet, they claim to live God-fearing lives, and hence homophobic. In the 10 commandments, adultery and murder (which can result from wife or child beating) are forbidden. But there is no mention of homosexuality. Obviously God considered envy and working on the Sabbath to be a much greater crimes than same-sex relationships!
I did really like this book, and liked Gordon. Though I would not have made the decisions he did, I can respect them. I chose not to have children because I could never put their needs before my own, and if forced to, I would be very resentful, and probably a very toxic parent. I have friends who are out and proud, others who are more reticent, and others whose preferences I probably don’t know. All are wonderful people – and most of all, they are my friends.

Way too long for my personal taste, even though in number of pages, it should fall on the short side. Specifically, I was only able to be emotionally connected to the book in the last 13%.

This was a difficult read for me, laying the groundwork with a terribly homophobic environment, a narrative jumping back and forth in time and place, sometimes riddled with diary entries, sometimes with an accent that I had have to put a lot of effort into decoding, as English is not my first language. Honestly, I don't really think that I can define a target audience for this book whatsoever.

One funny thing I could identify with is the fact that the sixty-plus pensioner thinking about emigrating notes that he can wipe his ass abroad with his pension in East Caribbean dollars. *cries in east european currency*

I am unfortunately DNFing at 35%
I was really interested in the themes of this book, but a third in I still haven't really been pulled into the story and I find it really hard to stay motivated to read.

I think I will have to come back to this one as a physical book once it's out and read just a few pages at a time to finish it.


Thank you NetGalley and Dundurn Press for the opportunity to read this ARC.

I have mixed feelings about this one. At its heart, it's the story of Gordon, a 60-something closeted gay man, living on the island of St Vincent, where a climate of homophobia has repressed Gordon his entire life. Gordon has been married for years to Maureen, who was entirely unaware for most of their marriage that her husband had a secret life, and whose diary of their marriage forms a large part of the book. On one level, I thought this was a really intriguing narrative device.

I feel like the tragic trope of a woman secretly married to a gay man has been somewhat done to death in queer narratives - I'm thinking of My Policeman, for example - and I was interested in reading a book that told this story from the woman's perspective, because I think this is often lacking. At times, this book really does this well. I actually found Maureen's character much more compelling than Gordon, especially as her diary delves much more deeply into her childhood, her family, and the attitudes she was raised with. This was an intriguing and effective way of building tension; we find out piecemeal what Maureen actually knows about her husband, and this works because we, of course, already know his secrets. We know what she doesn't know, to put it simply.

By contrast, Gordon's portion of the narrative sometimes feels a little shallow; he does very little for the first two thirds of the book except read his wife's diary and wait for their daughter's flight to land. After the two third mark, the action ramps up, and without spoiling anything, this part of the story felt a little rushed to me. The marked shift in tone from the slow, steady pace of Maureen's diary to the plot-heavy denouement didn't quite work for me; I think I wanted it to feel more cohesive.

Another element that didn't entirely make the grade for me was Maureen's character as a whole. Again, without spoiling anything, she suffers enormously because of Gordon's double life, and although we do empathise with Gordon's decisions and inability to live openly as a gay man due to the miasma of societal homophobia he experiences on a daily basis, I felt that Maureen was sometimes too forgiving. I can't personally imagine reconciling the effects of Gordon's lies as quickly as Maureen did. She's clearly a better woman than me. There were also moments in the book where both Gordon and Maureen seemed to be acting as didactic mouthpieces rather than characters, explaining certain incidents of homophobia within St Vincent politics in a way that felt like exposition rather than their natural opinions, and I wish that they'd been a little more developed.

Still, this book does a lot of things well. The atmosphere of St Vincent itself is done beautifully, with Gordon's colourful (to say the least) neighbours and family members, and the depiction of the social strata on the island. Maureen's mother is a particularly fascinating character, because although her actions are pretty awful most of the time, there's always a tragic undercurrent pushing her in this direction. I think this is perhaps what was missing for me with Gordon's character. He never seemed quite as torn between his two lives as I think he was supposed to. The fact that other characters did have this degree of nuance just made his lack of it more apparent.

Overall, despite not always jiving with the characters, I found this to be a really interesting look at life on St Vincent, and a valuable addition to the global corpus of LGBTQ+ literature.

What a heartbreaking story. You just witness everything going terribly wrong with every single character (mostly, especially, avoidable errors) and can't do nothing but feel sad and watch it happening. It felt too bittersweetly real, you can swear this characters existed or, sadly, that stories like this one are still happening right now.

It's a slap on your face, showing how the majority of the world are still full with bias and the bubble we're seeing getting better for diversity still is a bubble unfortunately. And how, even though Gordon and Allen are in a very fragile position in the society they live, they still fall and take advantage of the comfort of relying on a woman in this patriarchy world. It's just so sad in every single way.

The narrative is very successful in passing the feeling of reading someone's reflection of it's own mind and life. Not perfectly scripted or answering all questions or precisely descriptions of past events. It was like Maureen and Gordon were actual people telling their version of their lives.

Just prepare to see a lot of injustices beenig taken and committed by all of the characters. Along side with their flaws and errors. It's a very messy morally gray confusion. There's no bad or good side, just catastrophe everywhere.

I wouldn't have mind sticking a little longer to the story, to see more of what happens in the future of the characters or how certain events unfolded, but that end reinforced the feeling that this is a real story, not fiction. And, in it's own way, it is, sadly. It only brought more veracity to the story in my opinion.

Trigger/Content Warnings: homophobia, domestic abuse, domestic violence, verbal abuse, aggression, suicidal idealization, suicide (off page, mentioned only), misogyny, infidelity.

Highly recommend it! Super sad, but a very needed portrait of reality for queer people in so many places on the world. Ended this book speechless, disoriented, heartbroken.

Thank you Dundurn Press and NetGalley for the ARC!

i’d never read a novel from st. vincent before, and the fact that it is a lgbtq+ story deserves kudos in itself. but i cannot say i enjoyed this novel; i found it a bit too rough around the edges, which is probably on me — i just hate to see queer people suffer in fiction, as we’ve suffered enough in real life. but i guess it does paint a good portrait of the queer experience in the caribbean, which is both heartbreaking and quite compelling.

I wanted to love this book due to its great theme and synopsis. I think it was not well delivered unfortunately. It had a weird poetic writing style that I was not interested in. I think if it had a different writing style it would have been a lot better

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

Despite the great concept, I really struggled to get through this one. I got easily lost in the layered prose and could not for the life of me keep track of what waa going on. For a more patient reader, I think this book could be worth the effort.

I received an ARC of this book via netgalley. I didn't enjoy this book at all. I felt it was badly structured and the use of dialect was not well done. I think the concept has valure but the narrative did not pull that value out. The first 60 % was so dull and repetitive. I couldny really get a feel for any of the characters. The latter part never really made up for that. I don't see how this book can sustain a 3.5 goodreads rating as it becomes more widely read

There's no denying that the story being told here is such an incredibly important one. I enjoyed it being told from the perspective of both Gordon and Maureen (via the memoir/journal entries), which truly showcased how the different characters felt and were affected by the events.

I can't say I'm familiar with the culture and history of St Vincent and the Grenadines. The author painted a beautifully brutal and vivid picture of the nature, culture, politics, and homophobia of this country. For certain this was the strength of this book.

I'm not entirely sure if the writing was for me - I found the time jumps to be rather distracting and made for convoluted storytelling. And the story seemed to end so suddenly it felt anti-climactic.

While this was difficult at times to read due to the nature of the story being told, it was still an enjoyable read.