ABOUT
THE BOOK

Tell me if I am mad,’ Adam Avatar, a copper-skinned man with startling green eyes, asks Dr. Surendra Sankar, a psychiatrist in Trinidad. Aged forty-nine, there is some urgency in his request, since he fears that, very shortly, when he reaches his fiftieth birthday, he will die at the hands of his nemesis, the Shadowman. Adam believes he is nearly five hundred years old and has gone through nine previous incarnations, including living as a fifteenth century Amerindian, a Spanish conquistador, a Portuguese slaver and a Yoruba slave, a female pirate and a female stickfighter in nineteenth century Trinidad. Not unreasonably, Dr. Sankar reaches for his pad to prescribe drugs used to control delusional states.
As the consultations continue, Dr. Sankar’s professional expertise is tested to the full. On the one hand, his patient appears to behave with impeccable rationality, on the other, the accounts Avatar brings of his previous lives suggest buried traumas of the most worrying kind.

And when Avatar’s narratives of the experiences of his past selves are revealed to have an authenticity that cannot be explained away, Dr Sankar’s perplexity grows.