A Tall History of Sugars tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a guy who was ‘given birth to without pores and skin,’ in order that no one can tell what race he belongs to; and Arrienne Christie, his quixotic soul mate who helps it be her responsibility in life to safeguard Moshe from your social and emotional effects of his strange appearance.

The narrative begins with Moshe’s birth in the past due 1950s, four years before Jamaica’s independence from colonial rule, and leads to the era of what Forbes calls ‘the fall of empire,’ the era of Brexit and Donald Trump. The historical trajectory levels but never overwhelms the scintillating like story as the pair fight to determine their own view of caring, against the moral push of the colonial ‘plantation’ and its own legacies that continue to impact their lives as well as the lives of these around them.

Written in lyrical, luminous prose that spans the number of Jamaican Englishes, this remarkable story follows the couple’s mysterious romance from years as a child to adulthood, in the haunted environs of rural Jamaica to the town of Kingston, and then to England-another haunted locale in Forbes’s rendition.