The Hills Were Joyful Together by Roger Mais. London. 1953. Jonathan Cape. 288 pages. Jacket design from a painting by the author. The Author: from a Self-Portrait in Oils.

Roger Mais writes of poor people in Jamaica. His tales are moving and unforgettable. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   The author is a Jamaican and his novel is set in Jamaica. Its characters, who belong to the submerged nine-tenths of the population, are strangers to writers of books for tourists and to the tourists themselves, but not to the police nor to politicians at election times. Roger Mais, having lived and worked among them for most of his 47 years, knows them intimately; and his story, concerned with a small community of the industrious, the shiftless, the pious and the lawless, is as close to reality as art can depict it. Naive and savage, generous and cunning, sensitive and gross, their violence repels while their simple tenderness attracts. Their high spirits, their humour, their love of singing and dancing, are here contrasted with their primitive barbarity in scenes which evoke terror and pity, tears and laughter. In a style that soars into lyrical beauty and plumbs the depths of squalid tragedy, this is a novel of great power by a writer whose sincerity is not to be denied.

ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to; ‘it had been gestating for years.'