Scott's conversation with Orlando Patterson follows his formation from rural Jamaica to the writing of his first novel. Patterson recalls a childhood in Vere and May Pen, boarding with a foreman's family beside the canefields, walking down the path to an Indian settlement, and the day a one-room lending library arrived under a cricket pavilion, which he treats as the decisive event of his early education.

Kingston College under Bishop Percival Gibson, the years of decolonization and the rise of the People's National Party, and the poorer districts of west Kingston all enter the account, as does his refusal on principle to compete for a Rhodes scholarship and his choice of the London School of Economics.

The later stretch turns to writing: the struggling women of his early stories and of a lost teenage novel, his reading of Camus, and the Rastafari of The Children of Sisyphus, who he says lived the problem of meaninglessness rather than philosophizing about it.