Sand for Snow ― A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle

Robert Edison Sandiford moved from Canada to his parents native Barbados in 1996. He went for wife and work his new bride was a Bajan, and he had landed an editors position at the leading daily newspaper. Yet his journey Back Home also led to a series of insightful and often poignant meditations on relationships, island life, and the decline of his father, diagnosed with Alzheimers disease twelve years earlier. Coming out of the Caribbean as these stories did, they could not have been written in any other time or place, says Sandiford in the Preface. Part travelogue, part memoir, Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle is a thoughtful, revealing, and often humorous trip to a most unexpected destination.

Praise for Sand for Snow

This unpretentious, charming book reminds us of the power of observationand of reflectionclearly articulated.

Halifax Sunday Herald, Dec. 2004

The book for me changed almost immediately into the classical immigration story, where it takes an incredible leap of faith (and not lunacy) to leave the known for the unknown: the familiarity of the country of his birth and the support systems albeit regardless of the fact that they have failed him to [Barbados] the country of his parents' birth, a country he knows only from visits and stories.

Groove, 2004

Raised with a dual sensibility, Sandiford is able to see Barbadian society with unfamiliar, unglazed eyes, and report with frank yet discreet honesty its strengths and failings.

H. Nigel Thomas, Montreal Community Contact, 2004

This book...makes me wish that I'd been much closer to my father. It makes me wish that he'd always been there for me or that I could have been there for him....

Ricky Jordan

In his new environment, Sandiford ponders what it means to be Bajan, and what it means to be Canadian, and how best to reconcile the two within himself.... What follows is part travelogue, part memoir, and an entertaining critique and celebration of island life and city life. McGill News, Summer 2004Sandifords strength lies in provocative profiles.... Montreal Gazette, 2004Migration is one of the great themes of Caribbean writing.... But few narratives describe attempts by descendents of these 20th-century emigrants to return to the Caribbean of their parents. Sand for Snow is a thoughtful, modest, and quietly moving exploration of that reverse voyage. Caribbean Beat, Jul/Aug 2004

Robert Edison Sandiford is the author of Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Stories; two graphic story collections, Attractive Forces and Stray Moonbeams, and the memoir Sand for Snow: A Caribbean-Canadian Chronicle. He is a founding editor of ArtsEtc: The Premier Cultural Guide to Barbados, and has worked as a book publisher and video producer. 'Reckoning,' which appears in The Tree of Youth, won Barbados' Governor General's Award for Literary Excellence in 2003.