Wild Flowers (Short Fiction 1973-2017)

By Subramani

Reading Subramani’s compilation of short storied and a novella in Wildflowers is like having your own box seat at a marvelous film festival. Fiji’s first professor of English produces cinematic slices of life ranging in setting from rural cane farming communities to urban slums, middle class neighborhoods and a tourist resort. The stories heave with tension, swirl with color, and drip with all kinds of moisture. Bollywood, but Fiji-style. So, the central characters might be Indo-Fijian, indigenous Fijian, European; a farmer, a teacher, a child, a wife, a widow; each tortured either by a harsh reality or some figment of their imagination, and in some instances both. Several of the stories included in this collection have had previous lives-there is the award-winning “Marigolds” and the oft-assigned “Sautu”. This new book Wildflowers will now allow a new generation of readers to be captivated by Subramani’s visionary story-telling.