Charles Tomlinson

Carmen Peregrin, conceived in the jungles of Cuba and raised in the California desert, is the child of two rebels betrayed by their revolution. All her life Carmen has dreamed of the Cuban half brother she has never met. At last, during the hurricane season, she arrives in Old Havana to meet him, finding Camilo is not as she has imagined him all these years. By morning he is gone, setting out for freedom across ninety miles of sea on a raft made of inner tubes bound together by twine and hope. Carmen waits with Camilo's mother - the stoic Marisol, herself a onetime revolutionary - for news of his fate on the daily broadcasts from Miami's Radio Marti, but his name does not appear on the list of balseros who have survived the crossing. Instead, once Carmen has reluctantly returned home to North America, she learns that Camilo has disappeared deep within the belly of the Viper, Cuba's most infamous prison. His fate lends a darker urgency to the package he has asked her to smuggle into the United States, to be opened once she is safely out of Cuba. Back in the States, as she struggles to make contact with Marisol and to buy Camilo's release, Carmen opens the mysterious packet - and with it, a door into the past. She finds a 500-year-old chronicle of her family's history, tales of the unquiet ghosts of her renegade father, assassinated before her birth; of the ancestor who escaped the Inquisition to seek pearls and cinnamon across the sea and married a beautiful and enigmatic Cuban Indian; of the martyred Cuban poet Jose Marti, who sang of love, homeland, freedom, and music; of Cuba itself and its long history of outrages and absurdities, dreams and tyrannies.

This book, a fourth collection since Charles Tomlinson's Collected Poems (1987), is about staying young while getting older, and about the continuities provided by family life and shared interests. The title is a pun on the Spanish word jubilacion, which means 'retirement'. There are many poems concerning travels, in Japan, Portugal, and Italy, and one expressly called 'Against Travel', a poem that signals the dialectic of the book, moving between roots and wandering, wandering and roots. Tomlinson's roots are in Gloucestershire, but in 'Weather Report' there is a sense of Britain as a whole.

Desta and the other members of her Falasha family, Jews suffering from discrimination in Ethiopia, finally flee the country and attempt the dangerous journey to Israel.

In the Middle Ages a young boy crippled by the plague has an adventurous journey from London to the castle where he becomes a page. Directions for stage settings and a list of props are included. There are parts for eighteen men and eight women.

"When the rain comes pouring down Mrs Farmer has no choice but to let the farm animals inside with some very funny results. She ends up with dogs in the kitchen, pigs in the laundry, cows in the dining room, sheep in the sitting room & hens that lay eggs in all sorts of surprising places. When the water recedes she sends them all back outside ... but not for long. A delightful story about finding companionship in unlikely places."--Provided by publisher.