Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy AwardCaryl Phillips's The Lost Child is a sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves from it. At its center is Monica Johnson—cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner—and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Phillips intertwines her modern narrative with the childhood of one of literature'...

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.

"I go half way round the world and back thinking I'd made some sort of discovery and come back to find the same damn lies, the same white lies, the same black lies."Alvin and Errol can't picture much of a future for themselves. They're young, Black and living in England in the 1980s, with an entire country and political system set against them. Instead they focus firmly on their past – the sunny Caribbean and heroic father they left behind when their mother brought them to England ...

Caryl Phillips, who “pits himself against any kind of received wisdom” (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London.At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in London with dreams of becoming a journalist in the “mother country.” Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupul...

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnesse...

Three plays by playwright and novelist Caryl Phillips, written in the 1980s and collected here for the first time.Strange Fruit is a powerful study of a black family caught between two cultures; Where There is Darkness examines the plight of a West Indian man, Albert Williams, on the eve of his return to the Caribbean after an absence of twenty-five years; The Shelter alternates between the late eighteenth-century and 1950s London, explor...

Award-winning author Caryl Phillips shares the factbased story of three foreigners-black men attempting to fit into a white world. Francis Barber worked for Dr. Samuel Johnson, and after the good doctor's death he struggles for respect. Randy Turpin beats Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, but soon falls into debt and despair. David Oluwale is a Nigerian immigrant who is brutally beaten by Leeds police officers in 1969.

Caryl Phillips has received international acclaim for his works, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and membership in the Royal Society of Literature. Dancing in the Dark brilliantly re-creates the life of Bert Williams, the first black entertainer to achieve stardom in America. In 1896, when Bert decides to perform his stage routine in blackface, he is accused of reviling his race even as he becomes a star in Ziegfeld's Follies.

The Africa of his ancestry, the Caribbean of his birth, the Britain of his upbringing, and the United States where he now lives are the focal points of award-winning writer Caryl Phillips’ profound inquiry into evolving notions of home, identity, and belonging in an increasingly international society.At once deeply reflective and coolly prescient, A New World Ordercharts the psychological frontiers of our ever-changing world. Through personal and literary encounters...

The bestselling author Caryl Phillips has for years written about and explored the experience of migration through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays. In this fascinating collection he looks at the notion of belonging prior to and following 9/11, beginning with a reflection on his own experience as one of the only black boys in his school in the UK alongside his first interaction with a British Muslim boy who joined the school.Phillips turns to his years o...

In this fascinating inquiry into the African Diaspora, Caryl Phillips embarks on a soul-wrenching journey to the three major ports of the transatlantic slave trade.Juxtaposing stories of the past with his own present-day experiences, Phillips combines his remarkable skills as a travel essayist with an astute understanding of history. From an West African businessman's interactions with white Methodists in nineteenth-century Liverpool to an eighteenth-century African minister's comp...

A sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys.