About the Author

Born in 1941, Olive Senior spent her early years in Trelawny and another rural Jamaican parish, Westmoreland. In her Trelawny village she was one of ten children in a poor family; she was an only child in her relatives' Westmoreland home of comparative wealth. Moving between households, she was pretty much being shifted between two extremes of a continuum based on race, colour and class in Jamaica. She now lives in Canada.She is the author of The Message is Change (on the 1972 General Elections in Jamaica), Talking of Trees (a collection of poems), a reference book, A-Z of Jamaican Heritage, andArrival of the snake woman in the Longman Caribbean Writers Series. Summer Lightning, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for 1987, is Olive Senior's first collection of short stories.

Reviews

This is the most exciting collection of short stories to come out of the Caribbean for a very long time and it places Olive Senior in the front rank of short-fiction writers. ANNA RUTHERFORD IN KUNAPIPI Senior's achievement is to address ominous issues uniquely, by cataloguing, with wit and affection, the lilting speech and loping gait of the local population. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT