The story of three generations in a Sino-Guyanese family, The Last Ship (Peepal Tree, 2015) bears several traits typical of Anglophone Caribbean women’s writing of the late 20C / early 21C. Particularly notable is its focus on relationships among women, as family members, as employers/employees, as co-conspirators and competitors in domestic and commercial spaces. It is not a particularly lyrical novel – the writing is sparse and direct; sometimes long passages of description and reported speech elapse before the reader encounters the relief of direct dialogue. And, in covering the lives of three generations and multiple characters in the span of a relatively brief text (164pp), Shinebourne sometimes abbreviates, and omits richness that I feel the lack of. But what this novel does very well is to render its central character – the matriarch, Clarice Chung – a compelling figure, whose obsession with racial purity and defending an increasingly embattled claim to Chinese identity impoverishes her relationships with all her descendants, and yet keeps her right at the centre of everyone’s attention, most of all the reader’s.