The games were coming

Field

Condition

Type of search

Value

Search for:

Objects
Collections

Jacket front illustration depicts a scene from a bicycle race. A photograph of author Michael Anthony is on the back cover.

About this item

Notes:: Harry Grimley was the jacket designer. A young man trains for a great bicycle race held during Trinidad's carnival and the Southern Games. Anthony's first novel, The Games Were Coming is set in Trinidad (San Fernando) during the time of the Southern Games. The novel follows the uncertain course of the yet unconsummated love affair of the two young protagonists, Leon and Sylvia. Leon's fixation with winning the bicycle race and the intense training he endures under his father's tutelage leaves Sylvia lonely and feeling unloved. Momentarily beguiled by her married Indian employer's amorous advances, Sylvia becomes pregnant. Her hope is that Leon's offer to marry her if he wins the race is serious and that he will accept the child as his. Narrated in a simple, realist, concrete style, the novel renders the sense of immediacy that governs the characters' lives and the contingencies that they cannot control. This first novel marks the direction Anthony's fiction would take in its representation of the lives of ordinary Trinidadians, in their language and their behavior.