The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris
Author(s) from: Harris was born in Guyana (at the time, British Guiana) and lived there for about 38 years, after which he moved to England. He worked as a land surveyor in Guyana for about 17 years.
Setting: British Guiana
Original Language: English
First Publised: 1985
Description: This dreamlike masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature...
I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... British Guiana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands; a colony haunted by the enduring legacies of slavery and murder. A riverboat crew led charts a quest seeking indigenous peoples to exploit as plantation labour; but their journey becomes a spiritual voyage towards the Palace of the Peacock ... A genius money-lender, illegitimate child, and beggar become entangled in a strange drama that illuminates how slavery's descendants struggle to achieve true freedom ... A man accused of a murder he didn't commit is on the run in the jungle swamplands; but as his innocence is disputed, he stages his death, entering a hallucinatory otherworld ... A government surveyour captaining a boat crew encounters an elderly local man who accuses him of unfair dealings and threatens rebellion, building to a nightmarish climax ... Reissued as a new omnibus with a foreword by Ishion Hutchinson to mark Sir Wilson Harris' centenary, The Guyana Quartet - The Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder - is a dazzling, mythic, epic masterpiece, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.

My Bones and My Flute: A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner by Edgar Mittelholzer
Author(s) from: Born in Guyana and lived there for about 32 years before eventually moveing to England in 1948.
Setting: Guyana
Original Language: English
First Publised: 1955
Description: Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination up river in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realise that there is more to Henry Nevinson’s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a rich businessman, and possibly be thrust into the company of their daughter, Jessie. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay. Told in Woodsley’s sceptical, self-mocking and good-humoured voice, the tension rises as the cottagers’ sanity and lives are threatened by psychic manifestations whose source they must discover before it overwhelms them. ...there is more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek in this thoroughly entertaining work, though it rises to a pitch of genuine terror and has serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery that still echo into the present in the relationship between the light-brown, upper-class Nevinsons and their black servant, Rayburn. Amongst the barks of baboons, rustles of hidden creatures in the remote Berbice forests, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home.
Other Books by the Author(s): Corentyne Thunder (1970) - birth of the novel in Guyana

Counting House by David Dabydeen
Author(s) from: Born in Guyana, he moved to London at the age of 13. He spent over a decade serving as Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO.
Setting: Indian village and Guyana
Original Language: English
First Publised: 1996
Description: Issues of caste, slavery, racism, and the immigrant experience in the early 19th century are addressed in this novel. Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village are seduced by a recruiter's persuasive talk of easy work and plentiful land. They sign up as indentured laborers to go to British Guiana and discover their harsh fate as "bound coolies" in a country only just emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. In their problematic encounters with the Afro-Guyanese, hostile to immigrant labor, they confront the truths of their uprooted condition and learn to live with their fate.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Intended (1991) - won the Guyana Prize for Literature , Disappearance (1993)

Drums of My Flesh by Cyril Dabydeen
Author(s) from: Born in Guyana and lived there for about 25 years before moving to Canada.
Setting: Ottawa, Canada
Original Language: English
First Publised: 2005
Prizes: Winner of the Guyanna Prize for Fiction, 2006
Description: In a central park in Ottawa's Sandy Hill, Gabe, an immigrant from Guyana (South America), explores the past in the company of his young Canadian-born daughter. But this novel goes beyond the traditional innocence to reality plot, as it also embraces a quest for spiritual beingness in a compelling setting fraught with irony. Grounds shift as characters come fully to life; tropical and temperate zones merge; the past and present form intermittent shadows. Gabe's story of growing up in an Indian family struggling to live traditionally in faraway Guyana, and Christian, Hindu and Muslim worlds come together, as the plot unravels, and we continually move back and forth faced with new realities, new awakenings.
Other Books by the Author(s):