The Lagahoo's Apprentice

by Rabindranath Maharaj

This beautiful, harrowing novel, from the much praised writer whose previous work was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award, is the gripping story of a man who returns to the island of his youth in the hopes of recapturing a lost happiness.

Trapped in a loveless marriage, filled with nostalgia for a simpler, joyful time, Stephen Sagar leaves eagerly for Trinidad when he is commissioned by a powerful island politician to write his biography. The politician - a despot who has buttressed himself in an old plantation - ignores him at first, but Stephen is befriended by servants who show him a side of island life he'd chosen to forget. Then, as he explores the lush landscape, he runs into a woman who once loved him, and in her need to love again, his own longing begins to evolve and intensify.

The writing is as powerful and memorable as the story itself - with extraordinary characters, moments of wrenching poignancy and flashes of hilarity, and wondrous descriptions of the gothic plantation and its creeping, scented plant life.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Rabindranath Maharaj was born in the fifties in South Trinidad. He received a B.A., M.A. and Diploma in Education from the University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine. In Trinidad he worked as a teacher and as a columnist for the Trinidad Guardian. In the early 1990s Maharaj moved to Canada and in 1993 he completed a second M.A. at the University of New Brunswick. Since 1994 he has been living in Ajax, Ontario and teaching high school there.Maharaj is now well recognized in Canada for his published fiction and short stories, which tend to deal with everyday situations that challenge and stimulate the lives of men and women from Indo-Caribbean communities in Canada and in Trinidad.
Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star recognized his literary worth when his book, The Lagahoo’s Apprentice, was published. A previous novel, Homer in Flight, had been nominated for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
Two collections of short stories, The Book of Ifs and Buts and The Interloper were nominated for a Regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book.
His most recent novel A Perfect Pledge, published in 2005, seems to engage some of the issues and themes that Vidia Naipaul, who was also born in Trinidad, tackled in his earlier novels. Maharaj’s approach, however, is less scathing and dismissive. Although he obviously sees the shortcomings and inadequacies of life in this “now for now” immigrant society of Trinidad, he treats his characters with greater sympathy and with humane understanding.
Rabindranath Maharaj is also one of the founding editors of Lichen a literary magazine that in his own words: “ferrets out new voices, throws the spotlight on recognized ones, and adds to the broth a distinct flavour: a mix of city and country, of tradition and innovation.”