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Reading lists

9 books by Caribbean authors

A View of the Empire at Sunset

Award-winning writer Caryl Phillips presents a beautiful, heart-breaking novel of the life of Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea

Remarkable… The story of a troubled young woman trying to make her way in England during the early years of the twentieth century... A novel of acute psychological empathy and understanding

A richly atmospheric tale with a bleak glimpse of the empire

A View of the Empire at Sunset is a sympathetic and powerful portrait of an outcast…as well as a searing indictment of the empire

[Phillips is] a lyrical, transporting stylist and his focus on Gwen’s displacement has profound thematic resonance

A View of the Empire at Sunset quietly but powerfully articulates the social and global forces that shaped such a woman

Distinguished novelist and essayist Phillips explores with rigor and artistry the ever-after effects of the toxic double-helix of racism and imperialism embodied in the African diaspora in the Caribbean, England, and America... A daring fictionalization... Hypnotic... Phillips’ bravura, empathic, and unnerving performance makes the real-world achievement of his muse all the more surprising and significant

Haunting... Phillips is at his best in this powerful evocation of Rhys’s vision, which illuminates both her time and the present.

Phillips...brings his eloquent gifts for writing about those marginalised by race, colonial status and class to a fictionalised version of the story of novelist Jean Rhys... Devastating

Phillips’ novel of being and becoming, of memory, and the mythology of writers and writing is a wonder. This is a gift of a book

Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights

This dark, glimmering beauty of a novel penetrates the English mist, illuminates the past and present and offers us the life of a great writer, in the heart and mind of this great writer, Caryl Phillips

[A] lyrical novel… Heart-wrenching and hauntingly beautiful, with dark undertones

Subtle and piercing… Phillips keeps on taking risks and telling powerful stories

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Crossing the River (shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1993) and A Distant Shore (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004). Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN Open Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Granta Best of Young British Writers 1993. He has also written for television, radio, theatre and film.

Award-winning writer Caryl Phillips presents a beautiful, heart-breaking novel of the life of Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea. 
 
‘[A] remarkable novel… The story of a troubled young woman trying to make her way in England during the early years of the twentieth century’ WILLIAM BOYD 
 
 
In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, Gwendolen – not yet truly famous as the writer ‘Jean Rhys’ – is presented with the opportunity she has been waiting for. Her husband has received an unexpected inheritance; she can, at last, return to the island of her childhood. 
 
For Gwendolen, Dominica is a place of freedom and beauty, far away from the lonely nights and failed dreams of England. But this visit home compels her to reflect on the events of her past, and on what they may mean for her future. 
 
‘Phillips’ novel of being and becoming, of memory, and the mythology of writers and writing is a wonder. This is a gift of a book’ Niven Govinden, author of All the Days and Nights 
 
‘This dark, glimmering beauty of a novel penetrates the English mist, illuminates the past and present and offers us the life of a great writer, in the heart and mind of this great writer, Caryl Phillips’ Amy Bloom, author of White Houses 
 
 ‘Subtle and piercing… Phillips keeps on taking risks and telling powerful stories’ Times Literary Supplement

Colour Me English

A reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of non-fiction writing from one of our great novelists.

A polymorphous delight that always retains at its core the notion of identity... Phillips places himself in the tradition of James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin as a writer who, by moving abroad, has gained perspective on his homeland. And it is a perspective we would do well to learn from

An informal intellectual memoir... The question of belonging and exclusion suffuses his work, colouring his personal engagement with history, religion, literature, music and nationality. It has been the making of him

A thought-provoking collection by an accomplished author whose subtle, unobtrusive style allows him to explore familiar subjects in an original way

As lucid and urgently written as these meditations are, the main attractions in Colour Me English are the character sketches of other writers... Phillips passionately defends the capacity of fiction to shepherd us through these times of social change, by forcing us 'to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself'

I was utterly beguiled by his original outlook on literature, life, race and 'belonging'

An alpha-class writer, both as a phrase-maker and an observer of human nature

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of fourteen works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006.

What do we mean by 'English'? How does that image square with reality? How does our island look from abroad, and what aspects of our experience do we share with, for example, America - a nation built by outsiders and the huddled masses? 
 
Taking as its starting point a moving recollection of growing up in Leeds during the 1970s, Colour Me English broadens into a reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of essays and other non-fiction writing which ranges from the literary to the cultural and autobiographical. 
 
Elsewhere, Caryl Phillips goes on to describe the experience of living and working in America, and travels in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belgium and France and beyond. He considers the lives and works of many figures including Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Billie Holiday and Luther Vandross, and how their experiences are refracted through the prisms of writing, music and cinema. 
 
But Colour Me English always circles back to questions of identity and belonging, to the nature of tribal belonging and of its reverse, exclusion.

Higher Ground

A novel in three parts, bound together with passion and sorrow, Higher Ground forms a haunting triptych of the dispossessed and the abandoned.

The second story in particular is probably the best thing Phillips has ever done

Remarkable... every page of Phillips writing is convincing, a frightful part of our collective consciousness

Higher Ground is about the destruction of lives, about damage done in one generation being passed on to another. Phillips' book has an urgency and intensity which demands that you read more... to take account of what the voices he has imagined have to say

Caryl Phillips has proved himself among the best and most productive writers of his generation

The understated relation between the three parts is haunting and the whole is a work of total conviction

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006.

In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three characters separated by time and distance but united by the profound sympathy he has for their humanity. 
 
In the first story, a young West African is oppressed by the shadow of slavery; in the second an African-American fights to survive solitary confinement without sacrificing his integrity; in the third a Polish refugee struggles to ward off the increasing isolation of a life in exile.

A New World Order

'In these essays, Phillips writes as an anthropologist, novelist, playwright and documentarist. His insight sparkles in every line as he lays bare his cultural upbringing' Independent

Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, but grew up in Leeds and was educated at Oxford.  An established writer and academic, he lives in New York and London.

A New World Order ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award winning novels and non-fiction during the course of the past twenty years.  He begins this collection by establishing his belief that there is a 'new world order' of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes about the moment when St Kitts, the small island of his birth, became independent and talks about the role and responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He then turns the spotlight on Britain speculating about his parents' migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he both of, and not of, Britain.

In the Falling Snow

A major novel about the multicultural Britain of today, by 'One of the literary giants of our time' - New York Times

Impressive... The extended conclusion is expertly done; the sense of loss it conjures, lasting

Caryl Phillips is an alpha-class writer, both as a phrase-maker and an observer of human nature

A sharply observed slice of modern British life, cutting across race, class and generational divides to reveal the complexities we're constantly negotiating

There are some moving passages, notably his father's arresting deathbed monologue about the racism and brutality he endured in an unfairly hard life

Phillips subtly conveys a changing sense of attitude and perspective... It is a bleak message, brilliantly delivered

Social worker Keith, separated from his wife and their teenage son, is floundering in a world of fraught sexual politics, parental responsibilities and class expectations. He takes refuge from his domestic problems in a long-cherished writing project and a renewed relationship with his aging father, who came to Britain as part of the windrush generation, but for the first time in his life he begins to feel extremely vulnerable as a black man in English society. 
 
Meanwhile Annabelle watches the man she married against the wishes of her parents struggle with his grip on reality. Despite their three year estrangement, she realises that they have no choice but to close ranks if they are to protect their son from a world of street gangs and violence.

Foreigners: Three English Lives

'A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society' - Observer

With great empathy, and through a collage of voices, Phillips has created three distinct portraits. All are superbly crafted and utterly absorbing reads... An important and sobering book, highly relevant today

Phillilps once again demonstrates why he remains one of Britain's pre-eminent writers, ranking alongside the great American figures who were the inspiration behind his decision to become a man of letters - Richard Wright, William Faulkner, James Baldwin

An immensely talented writer, Phillips resurrects their thwarted hopes in this subtle meditation on identity and belonging, which explores how impossible it is to define the composition of a nation

Foreigners is among Caryl Phillips most powerful, empathic, and profoundly affecting books

'A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society' Observer 
 
 Francis Barber, 'given' to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, afforded an unusual depth of freedom, which, after Johnson's death, would help hasten his wretched demise.... 
 
Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and who ended his life in debt and despair... 
 
David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life and death would question the reality of English justice, and serve as a wake-up call for the entire nation. 
 
Each of these men's stories is told in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the tragedy of their lives. 
 
 And each explores the themes at the heart of Caryl Phillips' work - belonging, identity, and race.

Caryl Phillips

Discover this heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past from award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips – inspired by Wuthering Heights. 
 
It is the 1960s. Isolated from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, Monica Johnson raises her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors. But when her younger son Tommy, a loner who is bullied at school, disappears, the family bond is demolished – with devastating consequences. 
 
Deftly intertwined with this modern narrative is the story of the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys. Recovering the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, The Lost Child is an exquisite novel about exile, freedom and what it is to belong. 
 
 ‘Heartbreaking…compelling’ Independent

Caryl Phillips

The Lost Child

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