God Carlos

—Winner of the 2014 Townsend Prize for Fiction

“Darkly irreverent . . . With a sharp tongue, Winkler, a native of Jamaica, deftly imbues this blackly funny satire with an exposé of colonialism’s avarice and futility.” —Publishers Weekly

“Winkler has a fine ear for patois and dialogue, and a love of language that makes bawdy jokes crackle.” —The New Yorker

God Carlos transports us to a voyage aboard the Santa Inez, a Spanish sailing vessel bound for the newly discovered West Indies with a fortune-seeking band of ragtag sailors. She is an unusual explorer for her day, carrying no provisions for the settlers, no seed for planting crops, manned by vain, arrogant men looking for gold in Jamaica.

Expecting to make a landfall in paradise after over a month at sea, the crew of the Santa Inez instead find themselves in the middle of a timid, innocent people—the Arawaks—who walk around stark naked without embarrassment and who venerate their own customs and worship their own gods and creeds. The European newcomers do not find gold, only the merciless climate that nourishes diseases that slaughter them. The Arawaks’ belief that the European arrivals were from heaven further complicates this impossible entanglement of culture, custom, and beliefs, ultimately leading to mutual doom.