SOURCE: A review of Dear Future, in World Literature Today, Vol. 71, No. 1, Winter, 1997, p. 206.

In the following review of Dear Future, King faults the novel's complexity, lack of narrative development, and weak conclusion.

I have followed Fred D'Aguiar's work with interest ever since I read Mama Dot, his first volume of poetry, and attended the Royal Court production of A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death. The success of The Longest Memory, a novel in which the prose has the sensitivity of verse, confirmed D'Aguiar's ability to treat black history with complexity. Each work contributed to a new canon of literature written by West Indians born or long resident in England. Dear Future, however, may be his first book without such a future. The curse of magic realism has infected a highly poetical yet realistic writer; the new novel is difficult to get into, the technical complexity is greater...