Cover painting by Jackie Hinkson
In Four Taxis Facing North Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw captures the contrasting landscapes of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. She takes us inside the lives of rich and poor Trinidadian families, exploring a world of marital anguish, abandonment and secrets. Women in particular inhabit lonely places from which they are desperately trying to escape.
This is a country constantly threatened by violence. The crime, drug abuse and corruption that form a part of everyday life in larger nations become magnified on a small island. The title story constructs an imaginary landscape that envisions a nightmare of possibilities should all the potential for anarchy become a reality.
These stories provide a delicately observed view of Trinidadian society as it is today. The legacy of a colonial past echoes alongside the tensions of an island people at a crucial point in their history.
Four Taxis Facing North costs £8.99 and was published in July 2007.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-91-9
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw reading at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle on 8 May 2007.
(If the video does not play, you may need to upgrade your Flash player.)
‘Walcott-Hackshaw’s book may be the first to attempt to chronicle that particular moment in Trinidad’s history in which society is so preoccupied with the threat of crime that, as the narrator of ‘Strange Fruit’ notes, ‘we have all become detectives.’ In these stories children come to birthday parties with their bodyguards, and when a father disappears without explanation he is immediately feared to have been kidnapped.’
Caribbean Review of Books
‘The downside of having a father who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature – Derek Walcott – emerges when you try to write yourself. Nothing you do can hope to compare well unless you are extremely gifted yourself. Luckily for the present crop of West Indians, the Walcott talent seems not to have skipped our generation. Only time and her own body of work, yet to be produced, will reveal in precisely what relation Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw stands to one of the definitive international literary figures (and reputations) of our time. But the stories collected in Four Taxis Facing North, her first book, are magnificent. The titular tale might have earned space within the pages of Another Life, such is its beauty and force. All the stories are excellent, making them a delight to read, even if they subsequently disturb in the same measure. Few things in life deserve unstinting recognition and unrestrained recommendation but Four Taxis Facing North is one. Were he not doing it with what must surely be deep parental pride, Derek Walcott himself would be looking over his shoulder nervously.’
B C Pires in the Trinidad Express, 2 November 2007
Adding on 21 December: ‘The book of the year for me is unquestionably Four Taxis Facing North by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’
Walcott-Hackshaw’s first book of short stories takes an unsparing, un-nostalgic look at the here-and-now of contemporary Trinidad, from an urban middle-class female perspective still rare in Anglophone Caribbean writing.
The Carribbean Review of Books, which made it one of its nine best books of 2007.
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw was born in Trinidad in 1964. At eighteen she left the island for the United States to study at Boston University, where she received a doctorate in French Literature. She returned to Trinidad in 1992 and now lives in the Santa Cruz Valley with her husband David and their two children, Dylan and Amy. She is a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad, specializing in francophone Caribbean literature and nineteenth-century French poetry.
Walcott-Hackshaw began writing short fiction at an early age; her first story was published in 1987 by Spazio Umano. Since then, her work has appeared in various journals, including Callaloo and Small Axe. Four Taxis Facing North is her first collection of short fiction.
 |
 |
 |
Web site design by Cornwell Internet. Page last updated on 9th December 2009.
Flambard Press Ltd is a non-commercial, not-for-profit limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 05983763.
Registered office: Holy Jesus Hospital, City Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2AS.