Fifteen specially commissioned essays from distinguished authors explore the place of the writer, past and present, the value of critical thinking, and the power of the written word. Their work articulates 'brave new words' at the heart of battles against limitations on fundamental rights of citizenship, the closure of national borders, fake news, and an increasing reluctance to engage with critical democratic debate. Contributors include Eva Hoffman, Romesh Gunesekera, Githa Hariharan, Ja...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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'...

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...

A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II . . . her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood . . . the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel. These are the extraordinary people who inhabit Caryl Phillips' eloquent and moving new novel, and whose stories are connected by circumstance, spirit, and blood across the...

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...

**The humorous yet poignant novel of West Indian migrant life in London that adds an iconic voice to the growing Caribbean canonA Penguin Classic**Set in London in the 1960's, when the UK encouraged its Commonwealth citizens to emigrate as a result of the post-war labor shortage, The Housing Lark explores the Caribbean migrant experience in the "Mother Country" by following a group of friends as they attempt to buy a home together. Despite encountering a racist and...

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...