A Small Gathering of Bones

By Patricia Powell

Book Overview

It's 1978, and Dale Singleton is becoming alarmed as his friend, Ian Kaysen, is afflicted with a mysterious and seemingly untreatable illness characterized by pneumonia, lesions, and dementia. This novel of the first days of AIDS is viscerally affecting, as it conveys the shocked puzzlement of those troubled by Ian's condition while simultaneously documenting Jamaican society's struggle to accept the dignity of gay love. Dale's world collapses, yet his experience of being gay in a middle-class culture circumscribed by church, family, and compulsory heterosexuality is hauntingly memorable-and familiar.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807083674
• ISBN13: 9780807083673
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 137 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Small Gathering offers most genuine view of Jamaica Gay life

"A Small Gathering of Bones" offers one of the most genuine renderings of Gay life in the Caribbean in print. It shows with refreshing accuracy the spaces Gay men have created within Jamaican society as well as their challenges. Powell's writing creates surprising and intimate textures of male life. "Small Gathering" gives the lie to many stereotypes of Gay life in Jamaica and the Caribbean.