In Foreign Bodies Bee tells her story in the lilting vernacular voice of a young black West Indian woman—wise, humorous, resourceful and resilient. She is the victim of multiple assaults in her brutally patriarchal village, with the sole support of a stalwart grandmother. In spite of this Bee becomes a record-winning sprinter, expert seamstress, trusted housekeeper, a successful “cutterman” in the sugarcane fields, and a voracious reader. Bee falls in love with Cherry, one of her abusers and a beguiling character in his own right, equal parts tender and violent. With Cherry she discovers another side of sex: their pleasures heightened to ecstasy by their custom of crossdressing. Bee and Cherry adopt a normalized relationship resulting in the birth of a son and daughter. But Cherry's sexual confusion leads him to further violence; Bee deposits her children with her grandmother and escapes to Brooklyn, New York, as the caretaker of an orthodox Jewish family. She forms a special bond with Mistress Kuchinski—particularly after another attempted assault by her rabbi-husband—resulting in Bee’s own imprisonment. After her release, with Mistress Kuchinski’s help, she starts a lucrative sewing business and sends for her two children. Despite herself, Bee falls deeply in love with Pastor Amy, the Jamaican-American minister of the Anglican Church—and an outspoken lesbian. Pastor Amy moves into the brownstone with Bee and her children, and together they take a mortgage as joint-owners. Bee feels the longing to become a mother again—in vitro, the child to be raised with Pastor Amy—with a rehabilitated Cherry, freshly arrived from the West Indies, as the donor-father. In the final pages it becomes clear that it is to this unborn child, along with the reader, that Bee tells her unforgettable story.

William is an aspiring young novelist who has come to New York to escape his affluent, white West Indian roots. A chance meeting in a Greenwich Village bar reunites him with two childhood friends: Laurence, risen from his black, middle-class island origins to become a tennis progeny and Oxford scholar; and the vivacious Rachel, William's first love and Lawrence's current crush. Together, the three make a liquor-soaked pledge to return "home" for Carnival. But the festival's ecstasy soon slides into a fog of ganja, alcohol, and the endless soca beat. As William, Rachel, and Laurence journey to a remote beach to "cool down" after the festival, the three hope for a secret paradise, hidden "behind God's back," to begin anew. Yet even here the demons of history, prejudice, and hatred violently intrude.

During World War II an American military base is established in Trinidad, and the island changes face overnight--not in dedication to the war effort, but to "service" the newly arrived soldiers. Prostitutes decend on Port of Spain, gambling dens flourish, together with all manner of debauchery. Granny Myna is a young widow, her six boys all in university in Canada, their bedrooms vacant, her large home empty. With the General's encouragement--and to pocket some cash of her own--she takes in boarders, a motley crew of soldiers who soon become like her own sons. Every night, in an attempt to keep "her boys" out of the brothels, she tells them stories--tales enticing enough to defeat the temptations waiting beyond her door.

Lilla is the white mistress of a once grand Colonial mansion. Vel, her black servant, has come to the house seeking refuge from her poor village. The two women have lived alone for ten years in quiet formality, neither aware of the ways in which their dissonant pasts intersect. Now Vel finds herself pregnant, a condition she fearfully hides from her mistress. The unborn infant, Bolom--whose name invokes a child of Caribbean lore, struggling for life but destined to die before its birth--resists Vel's efforts to abort by drugs, bush medicine, and Obeah spells. After one last desperate and bloody attempt, Lilla discovers  Vel and carries her upstairs to her own bedroom, a private sanctury where Vel has never been allowed entrance. From this safe place the two women tell their stories, divided by a literal glass page in the same way history, class, and Colonialism have sepatrated them--a page the reader shatters through their performance of reading. It is a testament to Lilla and Vel's shared humanity, to their hope for the child to come.