Pleasantview
by Celeste Mohammed

Winner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction

Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the so-called easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there—a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.

Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his "outside woman" so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with one boy introducing another boy to a gun and to an ideology which will help him aim the weapon.

"The residents of Pleasantview come to vivid light in this extraordinary debut from Celeste Mohammed. Each slice of life in this Trinidadian village cuts clean to the bone, revealing how people are both complicated and complicit in the way we break each other’s hearts and bodies. From the riveting opening to the aching end, Mohammed’s gift for giving voice to each character is glorious."—Tracey Baptiste

"Celeste Mohamed forces you to travel with her characters. You see their lives and their world as they do, on foot. You walk in her characters’ shoes. Mohamed is a skillful storyteller, so the journey educates and exhilarates you, Mohamed invents a clear, crackling town/district, Pleasantview, a bustling, hustling side of Trinidad, where few of us have ever been, or will ever go. Pleasantview forces us to look at how we behave when uncontained, when unconstrained, when our lack of morality unmoors us."—A.J. Verdelle