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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.

Cambridge

Dramatic and challenging novel about freedom and prejudice by the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

A striking novel that pushes you dizzily into another time and place... Reading it is like being in the middle of a vibrant dream

Phillips points up the hypocrisy and humiliation of a society at breaking point; revealing it with subtlety, humour and humanity

Caryl Phillips has proved himself to be among the best and most productive writers of his generation...with Cambridge he takes a firm step towards joining the company of the literary giants of our time

This powerful, seductively readable book, set in a 19th century slave plantation, finally puts the sickening realities of the slave trade firmly on the map

Phillips is a linguistic and cultural virtuoso

Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cartwright, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation slave, educated and Christianised by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity.

The Nature of Blood

An unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain and necessity of human memory.

An astonishing novel: ambitious, pithy, beautifully written and - above all - brave enough to tackle the great, public issues of our century without pity, prurience or maudlin sentiment

A potent and ambitious fiction, a joy to read, and perhaps its authors best work to date

Phillips is a cool stylist whose intricately structured work builds with a slow-burning, emotional power, and here is some of his finest writing to date

An extraordinarily perceptive and intelligent novel, and a haunting one

The Nature of Blood is an unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, about courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain yet absoulte necessity of human memory. 
 
A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood.

Dancing In The Dark

A brilliant and affecting novel based on the tragic life of a hero of American entertainment.

This is a tragic story with not a word wasted, raised to an elegiac level by Phillips's supple, controlled prose

A subtle and poignant novel... A fine and beautifully nuanced performance

A compassionate portrait of an enigmatic figure... Written with Phillips's trademark understated elegance

Phillips has brilliantly resurrected a bitter-sweet life... Without a doubt Phillips' most accomplished novel

Caryl Philips novel tells [Walker and William's story] with sensitivity and eloquence. He is a consummate storyteller...

'The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' This is how W.C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans. 
 
Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to 'play the coon'. Off-stage, Williams was a tall, light-skinned man with marked poise and dignity; on-stage he now became a shuffling, inept 'nigger' who wore blackface make-up. As the new century dawned they were headlining on Broadway. But the mask was beginning to overwhelm Williams and he sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking, unable to escape the blackface his public demanded.

Crossing the River

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Award, this is a moving novel about the African diaspora by one of the finest writers of his generation.

A compassionate, forceful and profoundly moving revelation

[T]here are gems of impassioned writing quilted within this ambitious cross-cultural novel of loss and reconciliation

Crossing the River is dense with event and ingeniously structured. It requires concentration and is worth it

An ambitious exploration of oppression, loss and reconciliation that employs a collage of styles and ranges across continents and centuries

[Phillips is] a master ventriloquist, giving immediacy and voice to an impressive range of vivid characters about whom the reader cares deeply... Wonderfully individual

Caryl Phillips' exploration of the relations betweeen black and white is nuanced, humane and sypathetic. And his deep awareness of the historical process is combined with an exceptionally intelligent prose style - clear, unencumbered and compassionate

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 won the James Tait Black Memorial Award. Caryl Phillips has also won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 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.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 
 Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 
 
Caryl Phillips’ ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War. 
 
‘Epic and frequently astonishing’ 
 The Times 
 
‘Its resonance continues to deepen’ 
 New York Times

A Distant Shore

'A Distant Shore leaves a lingering taste in the mouth. A remarkable and penetrating novel' The Times

A Distant Shore is a distillation of everything that makes Phillips's work so impressive: lucid, deceptively simple prose combined with huge ideas and complex emotions... One of those rare novels which successfully examines vast themes through the prism of small lives

Phillips's clever novel about a society under increasing pressure to change won't fail to impress

This is literary fiction at its very best - a gripping, character-driven novel that portrays the malaise of a whole society through the stories of two individuals

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 fifteen 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.

The English village is a place where people come to lick their wounds. Dorothy has walked away from a bad thirty-year marriage, an affair gone sour and a dangerous obsession. Between her visits to the doctor and the music lessons she gives to bored teenagers, she is trying to rebuild a life. 
 
It's not immediately clear why her neighbour, Solomon, is living in the village, but his African origin suggests a complex history that is at odds with his dull routine of washing the car and making short trips to the supermarket. Though all he has in common with the English is a shared language, it soon becomes clear that Solomon hopes that his new country will provide him with a safe haven. Gradually they establish a form of comfort in each other's presence that alleviates the isolation they both feel.

Final Passage

'Caryl Phillips has proved himself among the best and most productive writers of his generation' New York Times

The Final Passage marks the debut of a talented writer...Phillips writes a nicely elegant prose, has a sharply observant eye, and the effect is truthful, modest and convincing

Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams

Caryl Phillips's first novel tells the story of Leila, a nineteen-year-old woman living on a small Caribbean island in the 1950s. Unsatisfied with life on the island, Leila decides to leave her friends and follow her mother overseas, taking her restless husband Michael and her young son with her. Her subsequent passage to England brings her face to face with the consequences of the decisions she has made to determine her life on her own terms.

The Atlantic Sound

'Taut, fascinating and controversial. The Atlantic Sound may prove to be as influential today as Roots was a generation ago' - Sunday Times

Like Jonathan Raban and the early V. S. Naipaul, Phillips can do truly live reportage. The honesty and detail forces you to experience what the writer is going through . . . Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, he seems to hone every thought and word before he allows it to leave his head. That stillness beneath his words is what makes Caryl Phillips such an exceptional writer and this book so compelling

So compelling and so original...The result is history and sociology at its most heartfelt

A powerful re-examination of the salve-trade and its terrible legacy

A glowing, indicting, dignified and dissenting work... The Atlantic Sound is crucial, unputdownable

'A splendidly honest and vividly detailed venture into some of history's darkest corners-by a novelist who is also a superb reporter'

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.

'Taut, fascinating and controversial. The Atlantic Sound may prove to be as influential today as Roots was a generation ago' Sunday Times 
 
 In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual. 
 
Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage. 
 
Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.

Caryl Phillips

The prose is as sleek as you would expect from a writer as accomplished as Phillips

Phillips has found a way to enlist the strange energy of Emily Brontë’s work and redirect it to powerful and surprising effect

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

Praise for The Lost Child

Heartbreaking... Compelling

The prose is as sleek as you would expect from a writer as accomplished as Phillips

Phillips has found a way to enlist the strange energy of Emily Brontë’s work and redirect it to powerful and surprising effect

Heartbreaking... Compelling

The prose is as sleek as you would expect from a writer as accomplished as Phillips

Phillips has found a way to enlist the strange energy of Emily Brontë’s work and redirect it to powerful and surprising effect

Heartbreaking... Compelling

The prose is as sleek as you would expect from a writer as accomplished as Phillips

Phillips has found a way to enlist the strange energy of Emily Brontë’s work and redirect it to powerful and surprising effect

Books by Caryl Phillips

Articles featuring Caryl Phillips

9 books by Caribbean authors

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