Richard Wright

Caryl Phillips

'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' - James Baldwin Gripping and furious, Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime. Native Son shocked readers on its first publication in 1940 and went on to make Richard Wright the first bestselling black writer in America.

Native Son

Following a twenty-year sojourn to England, Bertram Francis returns to his native St. Kitts, a tiny West Indies island celebrating it liberation from British rule, and encounters resentment from his family and friends

A State of Independence

Dohra Ahmad

Sam Selvon

Housing Lark

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 witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, A Distant Shore charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

A Distant Shore

The shelter-Il rifugio

""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 twenty years ago. But when Alvin returns home from his grandfather's funeral a new version of their past emerges, and the two brothers are caught in a desperate struggle to unearth the truth about their existence. Powerful and compelling, Strange Fruit by Caryl Phillips (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) is the story of a family caught between two cultures, and the uncrossable no man's land that can come between parents and their children"--About the play.

Strange Fruit

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, exploring the relationship between a black man and a white woman.

Strange Fruit; Where There is Darkness; The Shelter

Caryl Phillips: Plays One

The Shelter

This searing novel about slavery and its legacy brings the same stylistic virtuosity and tightly focused intelligence of Phillips's other novels. Higher Ground tells multiple stories, set generations and continents apart but unified by their ambitious exploration of themes of race, power, captivity, and abuse. In a slave garrison in Africa, a native collaborator betrays his people and humiliates himself in order to win the favor of white men. From an American prison cell in the 1960s, a black convict tries to impart his vision of race and justice to his indifferent family. And in a dreary city in postwar England, a displaced Jewish refugee watches her youth and sanity slip down the drain of history. Combined and in the skilled hands of Phillips, these narratives take on a devastating power.

Higher Ground

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 of living and teaching in the United States—including a riveting chronicle of the day the two towers fell—as well as historical and literary reflections with James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and other writers who grappled with notions of migration and belonging in their own day.

Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11

Color Me English

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.

Cambridge

Where There is Darkness

and protect their son, who seems to have become increasingly involved with street gangs and a world that is entirely alien to them." --Book Jacket.

Caryl Phillips

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