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 editor's 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 Alzheimer's 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.
Robert Edison Sandiford is the author of Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Stories, Attractive Forces and Stray Moonbeams. His articles have appeared in Caribbean Travel & Life, The Globe and Mail, The Gazette, The Comics Journal, and The Antigonish Review, among other publications. From 1996 to 2001, he was a columnist and an editor at the Nation newspaper in Barbados.
The author's latest award (December '03 — National Independence Festival of Creative Arts) was a Governor General's Award for Literary Excellence for a published short story called "Reckoning."
"This unpretentious, charming book reminds us of the power of observation—and of reflection—clearly 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
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