The young narrator of "The Intended" is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There, he is abandoned into social care, but with great determination and self-discipline seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice, 'but you must take education...pass plenty exam' and wins a scholarship to Oxford. With an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: '...you is we, remember you is we.' Through remembering his Guyanese childhood and youth in working class Balham, the narrator's older self explores the contradictions, the difficulties implicit in his aunt's advice and the cost to his personality of losing that past. At one level a moving semi-autobiographical novel, "The Intended" is also a sophisticated postcolonial text with its echoes of 'Heart of Darkness', its play between language registers and its exploration of the instability of identity.
As an Indo-Guyanese, the narrator finds himself seen as 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness', yet acutely conscious of the real cultural divisions between Guyanese of African and Indian origins.

About the Author
David Dabydeen was born on a sugar estate in Berbice, Guyana in 1957. His family lived for a time in New Amsterdam where he attended school. He recalls moving back to his family village, Brighton, during the 1964 race riots. At the age of around ten he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown where he studied for a couple of years. He was sent to England at the age of twelve in 1969 and was in care until he was sixteen. He won a scholarship to Cambridge University and read English there and at London Universities, completing his doctorate in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University for three years. He is currently Professor at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick and was for some years a roving ambassador for Guyana.

Reviews
'Essential reading. He narrates his painful story with a deft and often humorous touch, and provides us with some startling insights into poverty-stricken Guyana and multi-cultural London' - Caryl Phillips. 'A startlingly honest first novel which turns a thematic Heart of Darkness around to illuminate a groping pilgrimage' - Wilson Harris.



Book Information
ISBN 9781845230135
Author David Dabydeen
Format Paperback
Page Count 246
Imprint Peepal Tree Press Ltd
Publisher Peepal Tree Press Ltd
Weight(grams) 225g