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About Dog-Heart

Sahara is an uptown single mother facing the departure of her only son to college in the US, when she encounters 12-year-old Dexter, begging in the car park of a Kingston shopping centre.  For reasons which she herself struggles to understand, Sahara decides to try and help him with his schooling.  She meets his family and they begin a tense relationship, as Sahara struggles to find ways to improve their lives.  As Dexter grows older, he finds himself poised between two worlds – the world of material advantage and upward mobility held out by Sahara, but also the world of urban gangs in Kingston, where he feels more at home. 

Set in present-day, urban Jamaica, Dog-Heart tells the story from the alternating points of view of Sahara and Dexter, exploring the complexity of relationships between those who try to reach across a class divide and providing penetrating insights about the roots of coilence in such places.  A fast-paced, dramatic narrative, Dog-Heart reaches an unforgettable climax when both Sahara and Dexter must make tragic choices.   

Excerpt from Dog-Heart
The three boys stood by the zinc fence in the shadows, waiting. The tallest of the three had one arm and a massive torso. He was about seventeen; facing manhood. He could see over the fence and he gazed out into the night. The second boy was thin with wiry arms, nappy hair and scars on his face. He might have been fourteen or twenty. The third boy was the smallest of the three and had suffered a recent beating – one eye was still swollen half-shut and his mouth was split, but healing. His head was bandaged. He was almost fifteen and had not yet learned the still watchfulness of the other two. He seemed exhausted, shifting from one leg to the other, squatting and getting up, rubbing his wrists as if to restore circulation.

 Across the dirt yard, a group of men sat on the verandah of a slab-roofed house. There were lights on in the house, but the men on the verandah sat in near-darkness. The door into the house was open and behind the men, women moved around, putting food on a table. The voices of the men rose and fell. The waiting boys could not hear all they said but they heard the men curse and they heard the word “blood” many times. The men smoked ganja and drank white rum, except for one man who sat apart from the others. He spoke little and did not drink or smoke. His hair was styled like a woman’s with plaits and beads, dyed reddish blonde; he looked no older than the boy with one arm who waited in the yard. He wore two sets of earrings in each ear and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He was the don of Jacob’s Pen and he would soon make a decision about the three boys.

Reviews of Dog-Heart
The expendability of life in the ghetto and the perpetual injustice meted out to to its inhabitatnts by the state and so called vivil society lie at the heart of this tale of postcolonial darkness... McCaulay showcases her formidable writing skills in this ambitious, heart breaking work... Annie Paul, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston

Dog-Heart, a first novel of great narrative verve, looks at the insidious shadism that continues to haunt island life...a well-written and compelling work of fiction with a strong moral purpose.  Ian Thompson, Times Literary  Supplement

McCaulay’s real achievement in this her first novel is that she helps us see there are no easy answers to questions of class structures and class relations, to poverty and violence... this is a fine first novel.  Lorna Down, Jamaica Journal

Masterfully told, when you read Dog-Heart you will feel Jamaica's heart beating ... and breaking.  Esther Figueroa.

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