Cyril Dabydeen's new collection of stories, North of the Equator, looks at the polarities of tropical and temperate places. Acclaimed novelist Sam Selvon (The Lonely Londoners) says, "Dabydeen is in the vanguard of contemporary short-story writers, shuttling with equal and consummate skill from rural Guyana to metropolitan Canada." Dabydeen's characters occupy the spaces in between. They live in limbo, stretched between two worlds: one, an adopted home in Canada; the other, a birthplace in the islands scattered across the equator.In the tropics the outside world beckons and tempts. Characters are transported over vast distances by memories triggered by simple things such as the equatorial heat of a sauna on a wintry day in Ottawa, rain falling at a funeral, or an all-consuming obsession with a game of cricket. The result is cultural hybridity, a creolization in which geography means much more than just the place where you live.