Fortune
Eddie Wade has recently returned from the US oilfields. He is determined to sink his own well and make his fortune in the 1920s Trinidad oil-rush. His sights are set on Sonny Chatterjee’s failing cocoa estate, Kushi, where the ground is so full of oil you can put a stick in the ground and see it bubble up. When a fortuitous meeting with businessman Tito Fernandez brings Eddie the investor he desperately needs, the three men enter into a partnership. A friendship between Tito and Eddie begins that will change their lives forever, not least when the oil starts gushing. But their partnership also brings Eddie into contact with Ada, Tito’s beautiful wife, and as much as they try, they cannot avoid the attraction they feel for each other.
Fortune, based on true events, catches Trinidad at a moment of historical change whose consequences reverberate down to present concerns with climate change and environmental destruction. As a story of love and ambition, its focus is on individuals so enmeshed in their desires that they blindly enter the territory of classic Greek tragedy where actions always have consequences.
Praise
'Don't even read the synopsis, dive right in; Fortune is a read that rustles, breathes, takes you by its sultry hand and doesn't let you go.'
DBC Pierre
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A thrilling, gripping, moving book about love, desire, and making something of ones life set in the lush tropical beauty of Trinidad in the 1920s, Fortune is going to hold you in its thrall from the very first page to the last and not let you go long, long after youve put it down. Its also written in some of the most beautifully lyrical and clear prose Ive read in a very long time.
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A thriller, a page turner, an adventure story and a tense love story all in one. I couldn’t put it down. Fortune is a master work of Caribbean literature and a book which will stay with me for a long time. Smyth, here, is writing at the top other game.
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Intimate and extraordinary, beautiful and brutal, this master storyteller brings alive the lost world of 1920s Trinidad in an ageless parable of fate and desire.
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Like a fossil you might unearth in the sediment of south Trinidad, Amanda Smyth’s Fortune is a glimpse of a bygone world in which patterns echo warnings: after oil comes trouble, after joy comes sorrow, what is right can also be wrong. With remarkable economy, the complexities of oil prospecting, the human heart, and the natural world are distilled into a compelling narrative that gushes forward.
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A writer has to be at the highest of her power to slip so comfortably, so beautifully into the skin of history and let it breathe like this.
Jane Harris
‘Fortune is a sexy, steamy infinitely subtle novel. Like all the best literature, it takes a big canvas and yet foregrounds a small set of characters in order to create a page turning narrative.’
Reviews
My life in books: DBC Pierre
Written by DBC Pierre for Irish Independent on Sunday, April 17, 2022
Fortune by Amanda Smyth [...] is just so beautifully detailed that you forget that you're not living it yourself.
A novel with the momentum and power of a Greek tragedy
Paul Murray for The Irish Times on Saturday, October 16, 2021
Though her characters burn with passion, greed, desperation, the dreamlike quality of Smyth’s prose gives them the feel of sleepwalkers, blindly drawn to their doom. That inescapable sense of fate slowly builds throughout the novel, giving this brilliant reimagining of real events – the Dome Fire of 1928 in which 17 people were killed – the momentum and power of a Greek tragedy.
'Fortune is a fascinating portrait of Trinidad, an island that is beautiful but poor, troubled and full of danger. Amanda Smyth builds the love-triangle tension with patient skill.' - The Times
Passion and greed in the Caribbean
Amanda Craig for The Guardian on Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Based on a real-life tragedy, Fortune is a magnificently absorbing tale of passion, greed and the misplaced energies that cause environmental as well as personal ruin.
+ Reviews
Perspective Magazine
Maria Alvarez for Perspective on Wednesday, July 14, 2021
The originality of Fortune lies in the skilful interweaving of oil story and love story, of the plight of the heart and the plight of the paradise island, darkening with prophetic resonance so that passion and obsession smother both, reminding us not just of the genesis of our current ecological tragedy but that our lives and our world are combustible and fragile, forever in thrall to the dazzling black hole of desire.
The best books of 2021, chosen by Monique Roffey
Written by Monique Roffey for The Observer on Sunday, December 5, 2021
Still Life (Fourth Estate) by Sarah Winman gets my vote, not just for its mastery and sweep (Tuscany, the East End of London, war and beyond war, old gay ladies, young men) and the overarching theme of the power of love, but for its talking parrot as character, Claude. Claude gets some of the best lines. Also, Fortune (Peepal Tree Press), by Amanda Smyth, another historic novel, a clandestine love story set amid Trinidad’s early oil drilling years in the 1920s. I also loved English Pastoral: An Inheritance (Penguin) by James Rebanks, out in paperback this year. His family have farmed the same land for 600 years. We’ve lost so much, but Rebanks gives us solutions and myth-busts; a poignant and sad book we need in a time of climate emergency.
Fortune with black gold...a writer’s explosive love letter to Trinidad
Ira Mathur for T&T Guardian on Saturday, July 17, 2021
Desire, greed and betrayal are entwined with the landscape drawn intricately as a fresco. It brings a spectre of death and danger, sizzling heat, humidity, rain, mud, swarms of sandflies, deadly scorpions, mosquitoes 'firing high-pitched sirens', a cut-down silk cotton tree that looks like a woman in grey rags. There is immense beauty too–with clusters of 'pink wet fungus on leaves', 'the dawn sky is streaked as if a dye ran through it', sunsets are 'cracked with gold'. The rain is like 'jabbing needles that break the rivers' skin'.
Amanda Smyth's Fortune uncovers secrets in oil, cocoa era in Trinidad
Debbie Jacob for Newsday on Sunday, April 4, 2021
Snippets of history weave their way through Fortune, touching on civil unrest, a riot over proposed water meters and the developing oil business. The research is astounding, but even more impressive is how it enhances the story – never weighing it down with heavy details.
Oil is a fitting metaphor for the constant tension that bubbles to the surface.
[...]
She evokes setting with rich imagery, packing each sentence with sensory descriptions. As with Ernest Hemingway, no word is ever wasted, yet I can’t think of another writer who packs so much imagery into each sentence.
While the focus of Fortune is oil, readers will realise this is also a novel about migration, relationships, love, greed, deception and taking risks. It will require re-reading for the sheer beauty of the language and the need to ponder symbolic anecdotes that readers might overlook on that first read because it is easy to be swept up in the plot.
Alternate Covers
Original Cover
Walter Scott Prize Cover