Waiting in Vain
A Novel
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"I'm a Jamaican. Yardie to de bloodclaat core. I love stout more than wine. I love cricket more than baseball. . . . I love Bob Marley more than Beethoven or Basie. . . . And I think that the fat on a woman batty and hips is sexy thing that they shouldn't try to lose at the gym. . . ."
As the clock nears midnight, a travel-weary man steps out of the New York subway where Chinatown collides with Soho and TriBeCa. He strides up West Broadway in his tough, scuffed boots past cafés and bars. Then he sees her, and a spark is lit. She walks like a dancer, and trailing behind her in the coltish breeze is a light silk scarf whose flutter he deems
romantic. . . .
Meet Fire--Jamaican born, charming, poetic, and talented--a man who's vowed to never play "love-is-blind" games again. Then he meets Sylvia, a beautiful magazine editor who keeps her passions under lock and key. Together they must choose between the love in their lives and the love of their lives.
Waiting in Vain is a sexy, hypnotic, and beautifully written novel of two souls who meet by chance--then fall hard and fast in a precarious world of hopeful dreamers. With an amazing gift for capturing the subtle Jamaican cadences of his characters' voices, in prose that drips of passion both carnal and pure, Colin Channer immerses us in the fast-paced, often cutthroat art world where sculptors, writers, poets, musicians, gallery owners, and benefactors all reach for success at the expense of themselves and the truth.
From the galleries of Soho to the brownstones of Brooklyn, from the nightclubs of London to the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, Channer takes us on a wild, soul-searching ride as Fire and Sylvia try to connect, disconnect, and reconnect amid conflicting desires and wounds from the past. But through intricate love triangles, skewed priorities, and crushing personal tragedies, Fire, Sylvia, and their friends must learn that some things in life are worth fighting for. If not, you're simply waiting in vain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Representing a figure all too rare in contemporary romance, African American A.J. "Fire" Heath, a sensitive, sophisticated man with a good career, is a major asset to this appealing first novel by short-story writer Channer. Fire's combination of good looks, kindness and brains, and his desire to find the right woman "in the fullness of time," will make him nearly irresistible to readers of commercial fiction. A painter and novelist who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Fire shuttles between his native Jamaica, London and New York. In a chance encounter on a Brooklyn street, Fire meets Sylvia, another transplanted Jamaican, who is disappointed with her magazine-editing job and her art-dealer lover. Fire and Sylvia pursue and retreat from each other in convincingly soul-searching scenarios while Channer vividly describes urban New York, industrial Brixton and rural Jamaica. Channer has a fine ear for Jamaican patois (and for when it bubbles up in otherwise American-accented conversations). Also to his credit, Channer largely resists the trendy name-dropping and product placements so common in this genre. Subplots of intrigue in the African American art world add substance without detracting from the pace. As readers in the know will recognize, this tale of continent-hopping romance takes its title from a Bob Marley song. Author tour.
