How to choose between so many old friends? My life as reader and writer would be so much poorer without “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Poe, “Wingless” by Jamaica Kincaid, or “In the American Society” by Gish Jen, to name very different tales. Since those writers have had their due, I’m going with “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” by Pauline Melville. I’ve been a big fan of Melville since 1999, when I read her second story collection, The Migration of Ghosts. Perhaps because she writes in Britain, Melville, who draws on her British and Guyanese heritage in her work, isn’t well known in the U.S.

One of the things I love about Melville’s stories is the deft and moving way she handles the clash of cultures; her characters are part of a broad and complex canvas. Melville is a precise jeweler of concise but evocative language. Most of the stories in The Migration of Ghosts range from serious to somber, but “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” engulfs me in its world and makes me laugh out loud. I want to keep reading sentences to anyone around me.

The story sets things in motion with the first sentence: “The shop isn’t built that would sell a leotard Mrs da Silva’s size.” The occasion requiring such garb is London’s Carnival parades, in which competing teams, made up mostly of West Indian immigrants, vie for costume and dance prizes. The story starts on Carnival day with amply-sized widow Mrs da Silva, longtime matriarch of the Rebel War Band, on her way “to be garbed in a giant shimmering copper tent.” There’s a very economical backstory about Mrs da Silva’s recent romantic disappointment, which the Carnival season, “the beginning and end of the year for her,” begins to ease. Armed with this context, we’re off to a topsy-turvy day at the parades.

I love how the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled, how the children’s mother has a face that was as broad and innocent as a cabbage, how the grandmother—believing in her own empty propriety—wears white gloves, dispenses meaningless commentary and advice, eats a peanut butter sandwich and a single olive in the family car on a trip she does not want to take, on a trip no one in the family wants her to take. I love how the tension of the trip is imprisoned in the car, how it is the backdrop for the tragedy.

I love the perfect names—John Wesley & June Star, Red Sammy Butts, Pitty Sing, Bobby Lee and Hiram and the Misfit.

I love the way the grandmother’s self-righteousness and stubborn need to asset her importance in a family that treats her as little more than a nuisance jolts out of a demi-sleep, certain that she recognizes the landscape as a place from her past and I love the lie she weaves from that mistake: ‘There was a secret panel in this house’, she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing she were. I love what but wishing she were does: recreate the pinpoint pain of the grandmother’s lost chances, create the inevitable pinpoint doom of the now excited children discovering their grandmother has lied, imply what might have happened had she been telling the truth.

I love the miracle of the three sentences when she realizes that the place she’s convinced her son to stop is actually in another state and how her fear is so supreme that it sparks a physical reaction—her feet jump up—upsetting the valise where she has hidden her cat, who springs up and wraps itself around Bailey’s neck causing the car and all its unlikable passengers to roll into a ditch.

I love that the whole tragedy is the Grandmother’s fault. And how it’s not.