SOURCE: "By the Rivers of Babylon," in Washington Post Book World, June 30, 1991, p. 10.

Edward Hower is the author of three novels and of The Pomegranate Princess, a book of Indian folktales. Below, he favorably reviews On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows.

Displaced persons, the exiles among us, have always been popular figures in fiction. Looking through their eyes, we are given a vivid, unfamiliar perspective on our familiar world that forces us to evaluate our lives in ways we have never considered before.

Most of the characters in Neil Bissoondath's superb collection of 10 stories, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, are outsiders of one kind or another, and all have something important to tell us about ourselves and our assumptions. The author, a Trinidadian of East Indian ancestry who has lived in Canada since 1973, has a special feeling for people struggling to hang onto the traditions of their...