Novel · A way to begin
Beka Lamb
Zee Edgell · 1982
Synopsis
One day in November, Beka Lamb, fourteen, wins an essay competition at St Cecilia's Academy in Belize City. While the colony stirs around the independence movement, she holds a vigil in her thoughts for her friend Toycie, three years her elder, who was expelled from school when she became pregnant by Emilio. Through flashbacks come back the year Beka failed her examination, the bougainvillea her father cut down, the notebook in which her mother made her write down her lies.
Context
The novel was published in London in 1982, in Heinemann's Caribbean series, a year after Belize's independence; its author had worked on it for ten years, and it was to be called A Wake for Toycie, a title the publisher rejected. The first novel published in the new country, it was also the first Belizean novel to find readers beyond its borders. It captures the early years of the nationalist movement through the eyes of a schoolgirl in the colony; Edgell returned to the period in 1991 in In Times Like These, from the point of view of an adult woman. A Spanish translation appeared in 2025.
Who it is for
A short, limpid coming-of-age novel, in English mixed with Belizean Creole, readable from adolescence.
Prizes and reception
Fawcett Society prize in 1982; selected in 2022 among the seventy Commonwealth books of the Big Jubilee Read.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.