Caryl Phillips

higher-ground

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The Lost Child

A View of the Empire at Sunset

Colour Me English

A BBC Between the Covers Big Jubilee Read Pick

To Sir With Love

A New World Order

In the Falling Snow

Foreigners: Three English Lives

The Nature of Blood

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Dancing In The Dark

Crossing the River

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The Atlantic Sound

Higher Ground

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

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

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

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.

Higher Ground

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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

About Caryl Phillips

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