If you didn’t read the jacket copy, you’d be hard-pressed to identify Cherie Jones’ HOW THE ONE-ARMED SISTER SWEEPS HER HOUSE as a debut. Her bold, intricate narrative and prose that’s simultaneously lyrical and earthy results in a novel that’s confident and complex in the best ways.

The book opens with a cautionary tale, a story that grandparents near Baxter’s Beach in Barbados tell their grandchildren about the caves near their home, a tale of monsters and disobedient sisters who are gruesomely punished for their curiosity. The tale might be a fabrication, but the caves --- as readers will later discover --- are all too real and are ready to play an equally pivotal role in the stories of Jones’ four characters.

"[Jones'] bold, intricate narrative and prose that’s simultaneously lyrical and earthy results in a novel that’s confident and complex in the best ways."

At the center of the novel is Stella, called Lala by everyone except her grandmother. Lala has recently married a man named Adan and, as the primary narrative gets underway, is about to give birth to their first child. The two live in a ramshackle stilted house near the fringes of Baxter’s Beach, where Lala earns money braiding hair for the mostly white European and American tourists who want to look like Bo Derek in Bolero (the year is 1984, after all), and Adan earns his money by robbing those tourists and selling them marijuana.

On the night that their child (doomed always to be known only as Baby) is born, Adan is off on one of his “jobs.” It goes horribly awry when the intended robbery target, a wealthy Englishman named Peter Whalen, is shot and killed by Adan. His much younger wife, Mira, grew up on Barbados and is mixed-race but now passes as white. In the aftermath of Peter’s murder, she realizes how alienated she is both by the place she no longer calls home and by the country and people she thought she had adopted.

Rounding out the cast of characters (expanded by a rich array of secondary figures, including an incompetent police investigator and a prostitute) is Tone, Adan’s right-hand man and (unbeknownst to Adan) Lala’s friend and lover when both were young teens. Tone still loves Lala, and as tragic events continue to play out and entrap these characters, it’s clear that he’s increasingly determined to rescue Lala from what he recognizes is an abusive relationship with Adan, to catastrophic ends.

There’s so much that could be written about HOW THE ONE-ARMED SISTER SWEEPS HER HOUSE that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a strikingly intimate novel about the entanglement of love, hope, distrust and violence in these characters’ lives. At one point, Jones writes of Lala that “she did not understand that for the women of her lineage, a marriage meant a murder in one form or the other.” It’s also a fascinating portrait of the complex economics of this resort economy, one that on some level supports the local people financially and yet is deeply dysfunctional and exploitative.

Jones, who grew up in Barbados, portrays this land with love and affection but without a whiff of nostalgia for this place where beauty and tragedy, wealth and poverty, dreams and depravity can live right down the shore from one another.