Christine Barrow, who made Barbados her home for nearly fifty years, delivers a masterclass in short fiction’s powers of subtlety with her first book, Black Dogs and the Colour Yellow. These stories do not declaim so much as they stitch, quietly and with stunning resolve, a Barbadian tapestry as complicated as it is unsentimentally beautiful.
“Everything that happens in the universe has an impact on who I am, how I live, and what I write: thought, word, deed. Everything I think, I write, I speak has an impact on the world; like the...