Golden Child

The moment I read the first page of Claire Adam’s astonishing debut, it was obvious to me that I was experiencing a truly gifted writer telling a story about a place intimately known to her. By the last, utterly heartbreaking page, I knew I needed to share this book with as many people as possible. Golden Child is an emotional and page-turning story of scarcity, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the beautiful but precarious backdrop of rural Trinidad.

As the head of a family surviving and struggling to succeed against powerful odds, Clyde Deyalsingh is a father determined to raise his teenage sons well. But his twins could not be more different: Peter is a promising boy with a bright future ahead of him, and Paul is somewhat slow and strange. When one of the sons is kidnapped after a break-in, Clyde finds himself overwhelmed by forces terribly beyond his control, and he’s faced with choices no parent should ever have to make.

With unerring insight, Claire accesses the deepest fears and pains of having, and belonging to, a family; of all the unspoken dread a parent carries and negotiates with. In the same way that the Trinidadian landscape is simultaneously lovely and treacherous, Golden Child is a book that is at once gorgeous and unsettling, achieving the kind of breathless emotional resonance that we treasure in our most beloved stories.

Claire brings a singular familiarity and affection for Trinidad and its people to this remarkable debut. She has given us an unforgettable story, and I am honored to be able to share it with you.

Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life. Clyde, the father, works long, exhausting shifts at the petroleum plant in southern Trinidad; Joy, his wife, looks after the home. Their two sons, 13 years old, wake early every morning to travel to the capital, Port of Spain, for school. They are twins but nothing alike: Paul has always been considered odd, while Peter is widely believed to be a genius, destined for greatness.

When Paul goes walking in the bush one afternoon and doesn't come home, Clyde is forced to go looking for him, this child who has caused him endless trouble already, and who he has never really understood. And as the hours turn to days, and Clyde begins to understand Paul's fate, his world shatters—leaving him faced with a decision no parent should ever have to make.