When at age 51, Joshua Éclair--victim of a pygmalianism gone awry--emerges from amnesia in a hospital in Montreal, he must explore what makes him want to erase his identity, and must undertake the process of exorcising what has brought him to this pass. This is the gripping story of a man's search for sanity set in the fictional Caribbean Isabella Island and the various places Joshua has fled to: Montreal, New York, Tallahassee, London, Paris and Madrid.

This is a finely accomplished novel about a very modern predicament: the malformed dysfunctional identity in the global village.

H[ubert] Nigel Thomas grew up in St Vincent and the Grenadines but moved to Montreal in 1968. He is the author of 11 books and dozens of essays. His novels Spirits in the Dark and No Safeguards were shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize. Des vies Cassées (the translation of Lives: Whole and Otherwise) was shortlisted for le Prix Carbet des Lycéens. He holds the 2000 Professional of the Year Jackie Robinson Award, the 2013 Université Laval’s Hommage aux créateurs, and the 2020 Black Theatre Workshop’s Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. The Canadian High Commission to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States deems him to be one of Canada’s outstanding immigrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines. His books Behind the Face of Winter and Lives: Whole and Otherwise have been translated into French.

H. Nigel Thomas' profile page

"In lean, precise prose, Return to Arcadia journeys through the unspeakable and tabooed in the contemporary Caribbean, reminding us that the brutalities of slavery and colonialism continue to raise hell and fierce memory in the more secret realms of flesh and desire." --Thomas Glave, State University of New York

"Thomas offers a fine story of forgiveness, self-actualization, and belonging." --Montreal Review of Books