The time is the 1970s. The place is the coast of Guyana, a world of color and light, dust and heat, flesh and earth. Here in the cool, wood-floored home that doubles as a school and a community center, a young girl opens her window and breathes in the redolence of a Buxton Spice mango tree. And asks the tree to tell her its secret - and the secret of its indifference.

Buxton Spice is the song of Oonya Kempadoo's young narrator, Lula, and the song of her ill-fated town of Tamarind Grove: its colorful inhabitants, its eccentric families, its sweeping joys and sudden tragedies. Here are the mud-red banks where Lula and her friends slide down into the milky tea water of the Broadie Canal. Here is the emerging sexuality of young girls who can see what the madness of desire - and men - can reap.

And here, in a village torn between cultures, between the future and the past, will come an explosion of politics and violence ignited by the eternal human dividers of race, money, and religion.