Struggling to survive in the Kingston tenement yard, Surjue falls under the spell of the trickster figure Flitters. Arrested for robbery, he finds himself sentenced to the appalling world of a Jamaican colonial prison, far from his woman, surrounded by his suffering people.

This is a brutal and stark novel, full of Mais's prophetic rage and railing against the imprisonment felt both inside and outside jail. And whilst the novel displays an unflinching and deeply distressing realism, it is unquestionably also a work of art with a genuinely tragic vision.