Swimming in the Volcano

Winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction for Easy in the Islands, Bob Shacochis returns to the islands with Swimming in the Volcano, a “splendid first novel” (Library Journal) possessed of the same beauty as the places and people of the Caribbean.

Set on the fictional Caribbean island of St. Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation—one that proves impossible to resist.

At once an enchanting love story and a superbly sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century,Swimming in the Volcano is as brutally seductive a novel as the world it evokes.