We'll Always Have Tea

We'll always have tea & other stories is a short story collection by Rajendra Shepherd. The opening story 'We'll always have tea' peers into the quiet life of Derek, and Deidre his deceased wife. The pair remain connected - or are they? - through Derek's continual making of tea for him and his wife. This slow contemplation on love reveals an ageing life full of detail and mystery that could so easily be overlooked from the outside. 'Of Thosalus born' is set in a ghetto town in the Caribbean where a fallen baby angel transforms the community. The eponymous hero is a curious schoolboy who grows up alongside the angel and this story tells of their push and pull as brothers who must navigate the world both together and as individuals with very different outlooks. A Gothic tale rich in the imagery of the Caribbean 'Of Thosalus born' was a 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Competition entry. The final tale, 'The Maenad's touch' is told through the bleary eyes of a school janitor who gets drawn into trouble by a hard-drinking woman he meets in a bar. This cautionary story of a life gone awry shows how mixing with the wrong people can take you down a one-way street to hell. Part funny, part tragic and inspired by the writings of Charles Bukowski, this story contains coarse language. Rajendra is a writer, artist and academic who works at the University of the West Indies. His writing has been nominated for prizes and appears in journals and magazines. His non-fiction work on the power of language, Tilt - the gaze that changes everything, is available on amazon.com