DAT's Love

Combine an unexpected setting (the Caribbean community in Wales) with some truly fresh writing, and you get a debut collection that is sometimes funny and always highly original. Brito's narrators and characters are free talkers and freethinkers with strikingly singular perspectives. Following what she takes as a personal appeal from Churchill, a young woman at the Ministry of Labour finds herself recording all the scrap and findings after a canal is dredged in ""Digging for Victory."" Another woman who at 59 finds herself working as a model for a life drawing class recalls the day she thought the house had been robbed only to find that her ne'er-do-well husband had taken their savings to buy a motorcycle in ""T.I.N.A."" In ""Moonbeam Kisses,"" a savvy girl recalls, ""The day after the Pope died they put me in an orphanage, which they said was a `home.' Fair enough."" A woman, ""a godly singer,"" recalls the life of the less godly pianist Dooley Wilson at his funeral-""You must remember him-the coloured fellow in the white suit. The one who rolls his eyes when he plays piano in that famous film and sings that famous song, so doleful!"" (Feb.)