Set in a turn-of-the-century Hindu community in the Eastern Caribbean, No Pain Like this Body describes the perilous existence of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggles to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements end in unbearable loss.
Through vivid, vertiginous prose, and with brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a fearful world of violation and grief, in the face of which even the most despairing efforts to endure stand out as acts of raw courage.
With a foreword by Dionne Brand.
Harold Sonny Ladoo was born and grew up in Trinidad. He emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he published No Pain Like This Body. Shortly afterwards, in 1973, Ladoo died an untimely and violent death on a visit home to Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad. He was twenty-eight. Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays appeared posthumously in 1974.