Rapael earns his living as a butcher in a hillside village in rural Trinidad. He is also a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and left the novel to live their own lives. But somehow, miraculously, the novel, as Raphael has planned it in one hundred chapters of a thousand words, seems to write iteself...