Is Just a Movie

A “funny, moving, endlessly inventive” novel of life in a Trinidadian town during a time of change and revolutionary fervor (The Times).

In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970’s Black Power Uprising, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town’s folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love—and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life.

“Earl Lovelace is arguably the Caribbean’s greatest living novelist. In Is Just a Movie, he writes at the top of his considerable literary powers, picturing the Caribbean’s poor and powerless defending their ever-embattled humanity with resourcefulness and tenacity.” —Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

“Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century . . . with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody.” —Guardian

“Is Just a Movie is not just a movie, it’s a poem, too.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

“Confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies.” —Financial Times

“Starring two hapless almost-beens in search of movie fame, Is Just A Movie takes us on wild loving absurdist journey to the heart of a contemporary Trinidad.” —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe’s Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature