A graphic collage of six books against a multi-coloured yellow, pink and green background.

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Reading lists

9 books by Caribbean authors

6 books that define the ‘Windrush’ experience

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Books that define the ‘Windrush’ experience

A Memoir in Eight Lives

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

Colin Grant writes about the characters in his family with the mischievous, dramatic flair of a natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read.

Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author Girl, Woman, Other

An important and timely book for an increasingly diverse and diffuse set of communities, a reminder of those questions of home and belonging, an invitation to parse them.

Fascinating, brilliant, subtle, educative book.

Michael Rosen, author of We're Going on a Bear Hunt

This outstanding memoir contains a beautiful tenderness and a courageous realness. Vibrant, poignant and brutally frank, it is rooted in authenticity and wisdom, the details of a world well-observed. Grant's work here is powerful, evocative, empowered and forthright.

Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death

Grant's most revealing work... This compelling and poignant book gives a convincing answer to the first question: that there is more than one way to be black.

A memoir told through Grant's interaction with his family and others, but presented in impeccable prose and woven together with all the tensions and humour of the best fiction. A hugely enjoyable read. Get it now.

Roger Robinson, author of A Portable Paradise

Thoughtfully and meticulously constructed... A refined yet unflinching book.

Thought-provoking... Witnessing the next generation acquaint themselves with their Caribbean heritage, without perceiving it a burden, fills the author, and the reader, with hope.

Colin Grant takes us round his family and to the Caribbean and back, exploring deep feelings to do with memory, hope, loss and a determination to survive. There are great moments of sadness and humour.

I want everyone to read this book. Not only for the transformative powers of its humanity and lucidity, but because it is brimming with life. Tender yet shocking, funny yet sad, compelling and yet challenging too. It's revelatory. It's unsettling. And so utterly vivid with character and talk. I loved it more than I can say. But more than that, it changed my perception of how things really are. Colin Grant opened the door to me.

Under Grant's meticulous gaze, layers of historic Black British familial dysfunction are peeled back and subjected to loving scrutiny.

Grant creates a memoir that delves into the first-hand experience of generations trying to find their sense of self in a shifting, hostile world.

Stylist, *25 Non-Fiction Books You Can’t Miss in 2023*

Reaches new depths of emotional honesty... Courageous and well-crafted, and it pierced this reader's heart.

Nicholas Rankin, author of Churchill's Wizards

An account of his life in eight absorbing and nuanced chapters; portraits of family members and others, complete with detailed memories, sharp and funny descriptions.

Unflinching, honest and supremely intelligent, this wonderful collection of linked memoir essays cements Grant's reputation as a chronicler of the Black British experience... An artful exploration of others in order to illuminate the self. We are always in the hands of Grant's singular and deft voice, moving from the funny to the tragic in swift, confident strides.

A reminder that the West Indian experience in Britain... Has been rougher than rough. Grant's exuberant family story reflects their rude triumphs and tragic reverses.

This question of how love, aspiration, and identity is transmitted across generations and continents, of what is lost, what is distorted, and what can be salvaged and repurposed, is the central thread that runs through.

[Grant’s] seventh book… offers a broader account of his life in eight absorbing and nuanced chapters; portraits of family members and others, complete with detailed memories, sharp and funny descriptions on British Caribbean ways of living and being, and reflections on the legacy of intergenerational trauma

Colin Grant is an author, historian and critic. He has written acclaimed biographies of the Wailers and of Marcus Garvey. Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. His most recent book, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is director of WritersMosaic, a division of the RLF, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, which build into a poignant, insightful and unforgettable testimony of West Indian British experience. 
 
***A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*** 
 
'Grant is a natural storyteller... Compelling and charming' 
BERNARDINE EVARISTO, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
'Grant's most revealing work' 
NEW STATESMAN‘I’m black, so you don’t have to be,’ Colin Grant’s uncle Castus used to tell him. If Colin – born in Britain to Jamaican parents – worked hard and became a doctor, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden his parents’ generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. 
 
This is a memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, including of Grant’s mother Ethlyn, his father Bageye, his sister Selma, and his great uncle Percy. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant’s own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively, these stories build into an unforgettable testimony of black British experience.

Voices of the Windrush Generation

Homecoming

An unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history.

A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book in which the memories of bus drivers, civil servants, engineers, nurses, RAF and army recruits, teachers, shop stewards and seamstresses jostle with those of journalists, musicians, novelists and poets... The recovered memories in Homecoming are a formidable challenge to those still nostalgic for a lost empire, to all who cling to narrow and parochial definitions of Britishness... The voices in Homecoming sing throughout the book but they also reverberate pain, for so many are recounting stories they do not want to remember.

Grant is the writer to do justice to [the Windrush Generation’s] lives… he has conducted dozens of interviews, dug into the Mass Observation archives, and combed through semi-forgotten oral histories from the 1960s to produce this anthology of submerged lives that prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details.

Homecoming by Colin Grant is...by turns sad, painful, warm, revelatory and utterly fascinating. I think we would live in a slightly kinder and better country if everyone read [it].

Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant offers oral history at its finest.

Hundreds of first hand interviews, archive footage and memoir extracts of the Windrush Generation, beautifully edited into a patchwork quilt of experience and heritage. It's so powerful hearing these voices direct, making for a hopeful and angry, joyful and tear-jerking read.

[Grant] lets people speak for themselves… there is much to enjoy. Some of the memories are painful, some are joyous, others are much more ambivalent.

The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.

Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat.

The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.

[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.

In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.

Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that generation telling its story in its own words.

[Homecoming] artfully break the silence surrounding these unheralded lives [of the Windrush generation] and is essential reading for those who wish to know and honour them

Sara Collins, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON

An extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories

'A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph 
 
Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives. 
 
Homecoming is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history. 
 
** A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week** 
**A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year**

The Story of Epilepsy

A Smell of Burning

A Memoir of Epilepsy

Part memoir of Grant's late brother, part history of epilepsy: ‘An extraordinary work of love and art, which left me choked with tears' Observer

[A] brilliant, tender book… An extraordinary work of love and art, which left me choked with tears.

A moving memoir as well as a historical study of epilepsy… With verve and sensitivity, Grant tells the stories of individual sufferers.

Grant’s exploration of the literary, political, medical and scientific history of epilepsy is hugely compelling; his telling of the story of two brothers transcends the book’s twin genres and leaves us with a wry, gentle masterpiece.

A fascinating personal and historical account. *****

A flawless amalgam of personal memoir, mind science and medical history.

In writing A Smell of Burning… Grant may yet save more lives as a writer than he did as a doctor.

As a memoir of Christopher’s trajectory of illness it is tenderly expressed, and the book is a poignant evocation of grief and regret.

He brings a core of expert knowledge and skill as a communicator to the story… [An] absorbing and sometimes horrifying tale.

At its best is like the works of other medics-turned-authors Atul Gawande and Henry Marsh.

[Grant] helps us gain an eminently accessible insight into a world that…is still shrouded in mystery. It is a touching tale of brotherly love.

An enthralling and eclectic account.

A readable and informative book that should help to lay to rest some of the many misconceptions about the condition.

A brilliant evocation of a young man’s difficult relationship with a stigmatized disease.

A scholarly yet highly readable account of the history of – as well as current thinking on – epilepsy.

Thanks to A Smell of Burning we are encouraged to put into question our own perceptions of what constitutes balance and harmony, in our brains, our minds, and the world around us.

An informative book that will hopefully encourage readers to show more empathy.

Written by a former medic whose younger brother was an epileptic, this is a superb personal and historical account of the effect the condition has on the lives of sufferers and those around them

This is a sharply poignant and sad memoir. It’s also a brilliant historical and medical analysis.

One day Colin Grant’s teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. In A Smell of Burning Colin Grant tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. He shows us the famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc and Vincent van Gogh, the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works, and, through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

A 1970s Childhood in Suburbia

Bageye at the Wheel

In the tradition of Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and V.S.Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Grant's Bageye at the Wheel does for Luton and the UK what Miguel Street did for Naipaul, Port of Spain and Trinidad.

[A] vivid and bittersweet window into a vanished world of 1970s suburbia

Colin Grant’s memoir focuses on his feckless father…but tells the wider story of growing up black in Luton in 1970s suburbia

A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents. 
 
 'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph 
 
To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less. 
 
This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It’s a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing. 
And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia. 
 
LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation

Marley, Tosh and Wailer

I & I: The Natural Mystics

The history of the original Wailers - Tosh, Livingstone and Marley - as never before told.

By the end, the three central characters, the force that they became together and the forces that drove them apart... are more vividly portrayed than in any previous biography. What's more, Grant's clear, concise book, as well as revealing the Wailers in the light of their own culture, helps us to see into the heart of Jamaica itself, through the lives of three of its sons

Grant has pulled off a remarkable feat in the telling of their individual stories... An absorbing read that sheds new light on the famous triumvirate

The main merit of this perceptive work is that, by not making Marley its focus, it gets closer to the truth about him than most other biographers... Colin Grant has composed a highly evocative and original account of a misunderstood group, and the misunderstood man at its core

Provides a lively introduction to the life and times of the Wailers and, incidentally, to the neo-African religions and animist cults of beautiful, bedevilled Jamaica

In Grant's hands life in Trench Town in the 1960's is energetic and theatrical, rich in comedy and tragic irony... Grant's original and stylish second book... This brilliant book is not just about Jamaica, but about ourselves, no longer the country of The King's Speech but a post-imperial nation many of whose citizens have a buried history. Read it also for Grant's acute descriptions of its characters

One of the few books to get to grips with the social, cultural, political and religious forces which drove the trio... He has you smell the open sewers of Trench Town, and feel its deprivation... Joyfully literate and philosophically penetrating

Grant has approached a well worn topic in a lively and different way... Ever alert to Jamaica's adage that "there is no such thing as facts, only versions," he gives space to the ambiguities surrounding the Wailers' story without forcing conclusions, which bestows a rich sense of the mix of truth and fiction constantly at play in Jamaica... The bigger picture is painted in rewardingly colourful, often revelatory detail

The myth-making that surrounds the memory of Bob Marley has largely obscured the contribution of his fellow Wailers, Neville "Bunny" Livingston (later Bunny Wailer) and Peter Tosh. I and I restores these two to their rightful position

Grant...is skilled at peeling away layers of history

There are illuminating details and fresh revelations

This intelligent study...offers something more than the usual story of rags-to-riches and ganja-fuelled Rasta-speak. This book is full of...insights and revelations

The three pillars - Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer - occupy equal roles in this illuminating study from the cross-roads of music and society

Vivid biography...This brilliant book is not just about Jamaica, but also about ourselves, no longer the country of The King's Speech but a post-imperial nation, many of whose citizens have a buried history of slavery

Masterful biography...It is utterly riveting, taking in, as it does, true crime, West African folk magic and deeply corrupt politics

Potent account... This insightful book explores the roots and legacy of the trio.

Discover the untold history of reggae legends of Bob Marley and the original Wailers. 
 
The perfect must-read if you loved the film One Love. 
 
Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trench Town R&amp;B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers - one of the most influential groups in popular music. Now one of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines the story of the influential reggae band. 
 
Charting their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, Colin Grant shows us why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, he travels in search of the last surviving Wailer. 
 
'In Grant's hands life in Trench Town in the 1960's is energetic and theatrical, rich in comedy and tragic irony...This brilliant book is not just about Jamaica, but about ourselves' Guardian

Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

The definitive biography of Marcus Garvey from an exciting and talented new writer.

A brisk and well-researched biography... A splendidly colourful book

Gripping and sympathetic...monumental...Grant writes with the quiet authority of a historian who has done a colossal amount of research... and knows the smells and tastes of this period as if he had lived through it. He is slow to pass judgement, but when he does so, the verdict carries real weight... His history reads like a first-rate novel... Grant's book is a fine and valuable monument to [Garvey's] memory

Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable

In this superb new biography, Colin Grant portrays Garvey as a showman-ideologue [and] is to be congratulated on this scholarly, well-written account

Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research...Grant meticulously chronicles Garvey's eventful odyssey and sheds light on his revolutionary thinking and formidable public speaking...he shows Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity, his paradoxes

Approaches his subject with care and a storyteller's flair...a diligently researched account

An elegant and well-researched biography chronicling the triumphs and eventual disappointments of Garvey - black nationalist and Jamaican national hero

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey 
 
 'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' Guardian 
 
 At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious 'Back to Africa' programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica. 
 
With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey's extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people. 
 
'Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research ...Grant show's Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes' Independent on Sunday

Colin Grant

The incredible range and power of the voices and stories in this book creates a beautiful tapestry. It is an uplifting testament to our shared humanity and the eternal history of immigration

A powerful antidote to the false binaries of what does and doesn't make a British citizen. A real example of literature that meets the moment... Thankfully, voices like the ones gathered in What We Leave We Carry exist to offer an expansive clearer eyed path to understanding ourselves, others and the "othered"

A beautiful, inspiring book... What We Leave We Carry is a revealing, tender and sometimes funny portrait of Britain now. I loved it

Colin Grant seeks to ask what the word migrant really means – and issues a call to arms to reclaim it... The wonderful, personal stories that flow through this powerfully human book are a strong antidote to the ethno-nationalist rhetoric dominating public conversation

A moving collection of oral histories… This treasure of a book captures not just the story of the migrants, but that of Britain today, in all its contradictions

'A beautiful tapestry... Uplifting' Bernardine Evaristo 
 
What do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land? 
 
Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. 
 
Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain. 
 
Candid, profoundly human, sometimes funny and always moving, What We Leave We Carry is a chance to listen to Britain – in all its richness and complexity. 
 
PRAISE FOR HOMECOMING by COLIN GRANT: 
 
'Oral history at its finest' Daily Mail 
'Prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details' Observer 
'An extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph 
'Utterly fascinating' New Statesman 
'A hopeful, angry, tear-jerking read' Grazia 
'Essential reading' Guardian

Colin Grant

Books by Colin Grant

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9 books by Caribbean authors

Books that define the ‘Windrush’ experience

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