Celia's mother died bringing her into the world - when one soul flies in, another flies out, her Aunt Tassi says. So she lives with Tassi in Black Rock, Tobago, with her twin cousins Violet and Vera and Tassi's second husband Roman, a man so sly he could crawl under a snake's belly on stilts. Everyone knows Roman is a bad man, but Tassi felt so lucky to have found someone willing to take on another man's children and her dead sister's child that she latched onto him like a raft in the sea.

But Celia thinks that Roman is the devil, and when one day he does something that proves her right, Celia can't bear to share a roof with him for even one more night. She leaves that night and takes a boat to Trinidad, in search of her future.

Amanda Smyth's lyrical style matches the lushness of a tropical landscape with the rhythms of island life. Tinged with a sense of the supernatural, Black Rock is a vivid, intensely moving novel.