Gravity of Sunlight

Beautiful and flowing. Rare. Shand is a masterful writer. She captures the universalities of tensions in marriage, yet draws vivid pictures of the disappearing mixtures of subcultures in a Uganda in turmoil a generation ago. The lessons are subtle and still relevant.

This is simply a beautiful book with well developed characters, scene setting that makes you want to hop a jet to Africa, real emotion, and a wonderful story of love and longing, betrayal, adventure and everyday life. I love this book! With apologies to Barbara Kingsolver, it's similar in that it's set in Africa, it's about a minster, his wife and their children and their time in that strangely intoxicating country, but it's so much more readable than Kingsolver whom I never finished. One of the most interesting aspects of Rosa Shand's novel is the beginning paragraph of each chapter in which she sets a scene or merely ponders on something unrelated to the action. These pieces are so very poetic in themselves. And then there's the story -- Agnes, who many women will relate to, who cannot "will herself" to love her unconnected husband, fantasizes about a man who she becomes inevitably bound with. But enough of that, read it yourself, you won't regret it. (And who in their right mind would call this book racist? The "reviewer" clearly missed the point if he/she even read beyond the first chapter...) Rosa Shand, please write more!

This novel is so pretty, so elegant, so poetic. The beauty of the language and the depth of the love story set against the hideous ugliness of Idi Amin's reign is a marvel. The story is sensual and erotic, the prose so lovely that you feel Africa. The heat, the mosquitoes, the sultry evenings. A lyrical novel that's a delight to read.

The Gravity of Sunlight by Rosa Shand is an extraordinary and sensuous novel equally brilliant in its creation of place (Uganda in the 1970's during Amin's rise to power) and its exploration of human desire. Shand's depth of image in the externals of Africa -- the smells of wood smoke and gardenias; the musical sounds in the "buzz and whir" of insects or antiphonal native song floating through the "rustling of mango leaves;" and the sights of "thick green," "dusty glitter," and flopping banana leaves -- become inseparable from the internal soul. Equally, Shand's portrayal of characters through Agnes's sensitive and urgent consciousness, as when she sees Wulf during the early stages of her attraction to him,"a figure in a gleaming pure-white jacket, a man in the dark at the bottom of her drive" deeply penetrate not only Agnes's soul but our own interior selves. Agnes is a woman who craves love and attachment to all living things. Uganda, teeming with aliveness, paradoxically both nourishes her and fosters her restlessness and need for fulfillment. So real is the experience of this book that I felt a tightening in my own chest, becoming connected to Agnes's joy, pain, and ultimately her confusion and disorder over the mystery of love and how it perches in one's own heart.

I loved this book and recommend it highly--Shand is a beautiful and talented writer whose short stories I've followed in journal and literary magazines for many years.