Guyana

The Ventriloquist's Tale, by Pauline Melville (1999). English scholar Rosa Mendelson travels to contemporary Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, to retrace the voyage of novelist Evelyn Waugh. Soon, she embarks on a steamy, forbidden romance with a local half-Indian, half-Scot cattle rancher. Their illicit relationship echoes another doomed and incestuous affair that takes place in the 1920s. Melville brilliantly jumps from past to present, weaving these dual romances together with native folklore and Guyanaian history in a story that won Britain's prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award.