Monique Roffey’s second novel, ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, has just been published by Simon and Schuster and Elle Magazine, in its August issue, calls it “Heart-rending and thought-provoking, you will never again see the Caribbean as just another holiday destination.” The novel follows a young couple, George and Sabine Harwood, who arrive in Trinidad from England. While George instantly takes to their new life, Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill at ease with the racial segregation and the imminent dawning of a new era. Her only solace is her growing fixation with Eric Williams, the charismatic leader of Trinidad’s new national party, to whom she pours out all her hopes and fears for the future in letters that she never brings herself to send. As the years progress, George and Sabine’s marriage endures for better or worse. When George discovers Sabine’s cache of letters, he realises just how many secrets she’s kept from him – and he from her – over the decades. And he is seized by an urgent, desperate need to prove his love for her, with tragic consequences.
Roffey, who was born in Port-of-Spain in 1965, lives in London, where she works for the Royal Literary Fund as Fellow for Sussex University and then Chichester University. She has worked for Amnesty International and has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Sun dog, her first novel, was published in 2002.
Interviewed just a few days ago by the Independent, she named Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea as her favorite novel: “Jean Rhys taught me how to write a sentence and she had the literary skill and courage to pull off a book like Wide Sargasso Sea. “
Roffey, however, has no such love for V.S. Naipau, who, in an earlier interview she had selected as the “Author she’d like to see beaten with a stick, then never again”: “An important writer from the country where I was born; but a pig of a man, a national disgrace. I hope we never meet. As another Trinidadian writer said to me, ‘Some writers save the best of themselves for their work only.’ This seems to apply to Naipaul. I could fight him physically.”
For the brief interview in the Independent go to http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/one-minute-with-monique-roffey-1758354.html
