Sharon Leach is the author of the short story collection What You Can’t Tell Him, a featured columnist for the Jamaica Observer, and the coordinator and editor of that publication’s weekly literary arts supplement, Bookends. Her fiction has appeared in several journals, including AfroBeat Journal, Caribbean Writing Today, and Jamaica Journal. She was one of the first recipients of a scholarship to the Calabash Writers Workshop and, in 2011, she was awarded the Musgrave Bronze Medal from the council of the Institute of Jamaica. Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go (Peepal Tree Press) occupies new territory in Caribbean writing: the characters of Leach’s stories are neither the folk of the old rural world, the sufferers of the urban ghetto familiar from reggae, nor the old prosperous brown and white middle class of the hills, but the black urban salariat of the unstable lands in between. These are people wondering who they are—Jamaicans, of course, but part of a global cultural world dominated by American material and celebrity culture. Bringing a cool, unsentimental eye to the follies, misjudgments, and self-deceptions of her characters, Leach never loses sight of their humanity or their individual natures.
