Jonny is a young Bahamian, a promising painter on scholarship at an arts college in Nassau. Lena is the wife of a rabidly homophobic pastor. Jonny is troubled: guilt-stricken over his sexuality, the recurring target of attacks by a gang, and alienated from his alcoholic father. Meanwhile, Lena’s apparently perfect family life seems about to fall apart. To try and reconnect with his artistic gift Jonny heads to picturesque Eleuthera, while Lena goes there to collect signatures for an anti-gay rights petition.
On Eleuthera Jonny meets the charming Romeo, as Lena is drawn to the soft-spoken, compassionate Reverend Clyde. Through these life-shifting encounters, Jonny and Lena find themselves coming to a fuller understanding of who they are, a realisation that will have unsettling consequences. As poignant as it is provocative, Children of God is a brave and beautiful exploration of the search for acceptance—of one’s self, of others—in an often brutally intolerant world.
