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...

A collection of essays from "an insightful and sympathetic chronicler of race, British identity, and the immigrant experience" ( The Christian Science Monitor ).Born in St. Kitts and brought up in the UK, bestselling author Caryl Phillips has written about and explored the experience of migration for more than thirty years through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays.Now, in a magnificent an...

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'...

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...

"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 ...

In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the "European Tribe"-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history.Phillips deftly illustrates t...

Caryl Phillips is one of the most respected writers of his generation. An award-winning author best known for his fiction, essays and stage plays, he is also the author of radio plays, nine of which were broadcast by the BBC between 1984 and 2016. Previously locked away in Phillips's archives, housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, these hidden gems are now published in Caryl Phillips's Radio Plays, the first collection of these important works of drama.Despite...

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...

George Lamming—one of the Caribbean’s most powerful literary voices, championed by Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre—reimagines the age of European exploration in a work that stands as one of the great political novels of the twentieth centuryUnder imperial orders, a nameless Commandant sets sail sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, bound for the legendary island of San Cristobal—a place whispered about in maps and myths, promised as a prize o...

Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.Caryl Phillips's A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for onl...

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...

**Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadIntroduction by Caryl PhillipsCommentary by H. L. Mencken, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chinua Achebe, and Philip Gourevitch**Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Writt...