Stormy Weather

Sometimes a story’s setting is its most powerful character. This is true of the Caribbean in H. Nigel Thomas’s A Different Hurricane. In it, golden sands and sparkling waters provide a backdrop for a society strained by prejudice and the lingering effects of colonization. The titular tempest is cultural; the storm is one of social unrest and tension, stirred by inequalities rather than by the weather. And regardless of how characters brace themselves for it, they are inevitably swept up in its destructive path.

In a 2015 Xtra profile coinciding with the publication of an earlier novel, No Safeguards, Thomas spoke of growing up queer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Although he had been based in Montreal for nearly five decades, he discussed the enduring influence of his adolescence on his writing, particularly the public displays of violence he witnessed against gay men. “Effeminacy and homosexuality were considered to be one and the...