An extraordinarily affecting debut novel from a Writers’ Trust of Canada “rising star”—a writer who grew up on one island in the Caribbean (Jamaica) and immigrated to a very different one in the North Atlantic (Newfoundland), and whose work is uniquely informed by both places.
Xaiver Campbell’s debut novel Scandal Bag is a brilliant, fresh take on the classic bildungsroman. It tells the coming-of-age story of a gifted young gay man named Jermaine, whose physical and emotional journey will eventually take him from his Caribbean home, where he lives with his doting mother and grandmother, to university in St John’s, Newfoundland, where his sense of identity and belonging must be radically remade. With clarity and immediacy, Xaiver Campbell takes us inside the life and mind of Jermaine, tracing the shifts in his understanding through a series of romantic and erotic bonds, as well as revelations about faith, race, and class. Throughout the novel, the reader is utterly swept along by the sheer robustness, charm and specificity of Campbell’s storytelling. Scandal Bag is a charged blossom of a book, generous in its insights into the transformations of its protagonist through years, relationships and across islands. As the award-winning writer Lisa Moore noted, “Xaiver Campbell is a writer who understands the malleability and materiality of language. He builds characters from the inside out through dialect, cadence, and gesture with the flux of charged emotion, and captures deep intimacies like the sweetness of a mango in a beloved grandmother’s backyard. His writing is sensuous, daring, and sometimes wildly erotic―full of wry humour, unexpected insights, rambunctious joy, exclusion and belonging.”
