Dog War

“Every country (if she’s lucky) gets the Mark Twain she deserves, and Winkler is ours, bristling with savage Jamaican wit, heart-stopping compassion, and jaw-dropping humor all at once. And Dog War is his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, except Precious is no yankee. She’s a willful, stubborn, unintentionally funny Jamaican everywoman suddenly thrust into an America that’s the opposite, always bending, twisting, and changing into shapes as confounding as they are hilarious. You don’t read Dog War, you wait for the sparks to fly and hope they don’t commit you for laughing out so loud for so long.” —Marlon James, author of John Crow’s Devil

In a new and highly original take on Jamaican life, Winkler, the Caribbean’s unrivalled master of adult comedy, introduces the estimable Precious Higginson, a large-bottomed, meltingly juicy, middle-class Jamaican woman with unshakable ideas on the right and proper behavior for Christian Jamaican women, their husbands, and men and dogs in general. But, when her husband passes away suddenly, Precious finds herself isolated in a mountainous region of Jamaica where her husband had always dreamed of living.

Even worse, she finds her conventional world and her place in it coming apart—her ideas on proper behavior assailed on every side. One insulting episode after another occurs until she ends up in Miami working for a rich widow who is a fanatic about animals in general and her pampered lapdog in particular. With the indignities of life piling up on her, Precious struggles to make sense of the world she had lived in before her husband’s death and to defend herself against monstrous assaults on her conventional beliefs. The climax of the story leaves Precious reeling, and sends her scurrying back home to evaluate this topsy-turvy madhouse called life and her place in it.