Now for Ron Ramdin's second novel in the series...
About The Griot’s Tale
The Griot's Tale tells the story of Adamah, the Griot (African story-eller) who, as a child, is filled with wonder and curiosity by his mother’s magical stories. Later, he also hears disturbing things about her African roots and of life on the slave plantations. He learns to read and with his Master, he travels to England where he gains his freedom.
The novel is set in England during the late 18th century and the Regency period, a time of great change (including the struggle to abolish the African Slave Trade) and evolves from Africa to the Island, then via America across the Atlantic to England. Thereafter, the Griot’s life takes many twists and turns, which brings him into contact with people from many lands as he moves back and forth from London to the Provinces. After meeting Rachele and falling in love with her, they were married and he lived in London where from his Newgate prison cell he tells his ‘Tale’ as he awaits ‘ 'trial.’
In this story of love and loss, of betrayal, freedom and bondage, the Griot emerges as that rare character in British literature, a ‘Black’ hero in Regency England, who is motivated by a deep need to understand and interpret his life experience. He strives to become an “ethical being” (his life enfolded as a story within a story in a non-linear style where unpredictability prevails’) and does so through the seemingly unrealisable ambition of telling his own story in writing and achieves this not with anger, but with ‘meditative thoughts, reflection and compassion.’
The Griot’s Tale is absorbing from beginning to end. As the tension grows, Ron Ramdin’s wonderful, inventive, fluent writing gets more adventurous from one episode to another. It is a rare literary work “ where the plot and style are a message in themselves’, a process through which the Griot replaces the ‘oral by the written word, where words say more than it speaks and means more than it utters.’
This timely and timeless novel will not fail to move those who read it.
About Ron Ramdin
Ron Ramdin was born in Trinidad. On arrival in London, he attended the New Era Academy of Drama and Music and after singing in various London venues, (including Alexandra Palace, Islington Town Hall and pubs) and making a ‘Demo Disc’ he turned to academic study. Following graduation with a Bsc con degree from the London School of Economics, he began a period of many years of research and writing. He has lectured across Britain, and internationally, in Seville, Murcia in Spain; at the Sorbonne, Paris and was invited to give the prestigious 1997 Whitbread Cardiff Lecture entitled: ‘Homelessness and the Novel.’ He appeared on the first day of the 2000 Cheltenham Festival of Literature and was ‘Writer of the Week’ at the British Library Bookshop in October 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 1996 he received the D.Lit from the University of London. The American Biographical Institute has recently bestowed upon Ron Ramdin the 2006 International Peace Prize and Man of the Year 2006 honours, as well as inclusion in Great Minds of the 21st Century.
Ron Ramdin’s first novel Rama’s Voyage, published previously in a limited edition in the Caribbean, has received critical acclaim in India and the Caribbean. Of his second forthcoming novel The Griot’s Tale, one reviewer has written: ‘The Griot’s writing is the courageous decision to replace the oral by the written word, where words say more than it speaks and means more than it utters. It is a quest for words where the search creates a melody that is read poetically between and beyond words…The revelation of The Griot’s Tale is that those who can genuinely encounter with the sublime, do not die but are touched by that which is within us as mythical immortals.’
Ron Ramdin is currently working on a new novel.
