Daylight Come

With his Olympic dreams crushed by the raging World War, Jamaican sprinter Pico Campbell must struggle with his unfulfilled ambitions and a powerful longing to leave his small rural village. A job in
bustling Kingston and its carnal delights prove distracting but largely unfulfilling.

The story opens in 1940s Jamaica, where thousands of foreigners – Allied soldiers, enemy POWs and spies – have changed the island landscape while Armageddon roars in Europe. A mysterious Englishman has come to the island in a hurry, determined to stop a German weapon that could win the war for Hitler. The Nazis threaten British annihilation, and if the Englishman fails, the Empire is forfeit. Jamaicans’ demands for freedom from England are growing louder, but he knows they must help him or become part of the ‘Greater German Reich.’

Flash-forward to Jamaica in the mid-1960s, when the island’s spirits are soaring in the glow of independence from Britain. But Pico Campbell is now a man very lost in paradise, a drunkard who doesn’t share the euphoria of the new era of nationalistic promise. He has become a victim of his own history, caught between his need to recall cataclysmic events from the war years and the paralyzing fear that he may find neither redemption nor lasting love.

With its grand sweep of time and space, Daylight Come is a new kind of thriller, with unforgettable characters, a Jamaica long gone and a world where life could have been very different in the aftermath of the Second World War.