Desmond Hall: Hi everybody. I'm Desmond Hall. I'm the author of Your Corner Dark, a young adult novel. The title of the book, Your Corner Dark, is a Jamaican phrase which means... the equivalent would be being stuck between a rock and a hard place. As a former school teacher, I remember, that you can teach your lesson plan really well, but if you don't do it in a way that engages the kids from the beginning, you don't have their attention and their level of engagement which gives the best learning, I'd say.

I like to think of it as a moral tale. Your Corner Dark is about choices and impossible odds. And, in a way, you can think of it like Victor Hugo's book, Les Miserables, where Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her many children. And this brings up a great debate, a moral debate, about whether this is just or not. In the same way, I think, Frankie's conundrum brings up a great debate. Is it right for him to join a posse in order to, in effect, save his father's life?

There are several inspirations for writing Your Corner Dark and one of them is what I've seen with the two-party system in Jamaica. The JLP Party and the PNP Party, the equivalence of the Democrats and Republicans, have used gangs to control the vote. This has caused a lot of issues in Jamaica. And though the gang issue is, in terms of the political connections, is tamped down, it still exists. And it's something that I thought really needed to be talked about. And so I set the book in a fictional election year and Frankie gets caught up in the political intrigue of the time.

One other inspiration that I have is, when I was a boy in Jamaica, my parents and many of my relatives would sleep with the doors wide open at night. And, now, you can't go anywhere in Jamaica where you don't see grills, bar grills in front of windows, in front of doors, and just a lot of this fear of crime. Even in my area on the North Coast, this was never as such an issue. And just in the last few years, several years, actually, the Jamaican government has called several "state of emergencies" where the military has gone door-to-door looking for gangs in areas where this type of crime was never that high. So, I thought that was an issue that needed also to be dealt with.

And on a personal level, one of my uncles was killed in a gang-related incident. And it caused a lot of issues in my family. And, especially between my mother and I, those issues never really got ironed out and she's died. And so, unfortunately, I have never been able to work that out. So, I think, in many ways, writing Your Corner Dark works out a lot of those issues.

So, I'm going to read from the very opening of my YA novel Your Corner Dark:

Frankie put down his empty water bucket on the side of a steep mountainside road that was just wide enough for a sedan and two well-fed goats. The sun had only just started to warm, too early for the post office to be open. Still, Frankie gazed at the ramshackle building. His scholarship letter could be inside. And it was nearly all he thought about these days. If it came -- if it brought good news -- he could soon be headed off to study in America. Jamaica was so bankrupt it could hardly afford hope, but hope was Frankie's light, and one he shined often. In the distance lay miles of lush green forest and fields, and beyond that, the capital city of Kingston. A handful of twenty-story structures sat at the center of the skyline. Near the Olympic stadium, where he'd once seen the Jamaican sprinters practice relays, stood the University of West Indies campus. Frankie knew he could get into their engineering program, but all a Jamaican diploma guaranteed was debt. Jobs for young people were just too hard to find. Gnats circled his head. Frankie stuck a forefinger in the corner of his eye and removed a dead one. He studied it -- his own career might be as short-lived, even if he got a chance to study at the University of Arizona. A classmate's older brother had recently come back from America -- he hadn't been able to secure work even though he had a master's degree in engineering. No way was Frankie going to let that happen. He flicked the gnat away.

The rev of an engine broke the early morning quiet. A black Toyota barrelled down the mountain toward him. A thumping bass and pulsating rhythm rippled through the humid air....