From one of our most admired fiction writers: the searing story of breakdown and recovery in the life of one man and of a society moving from one idea of itself to another.
Keith--born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother--is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years (whose family "let her go" when she married a black man), kept at arm's length by his seventeen-year-old son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a co-worker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work--even in fact his life--is no longer relevant.
Moving deftly between past and present, the narrative uncovers the particulars of class, background, temperament, and desire that have brought Keith to this moment, and reveals how, often unwittingly, his wife, his son, and, ultimately, his father help him grasp the breadth of the changes that have occurred around him--and what these changes will require of him.
At once intimate and expansive, deeply moving in its portrayal of the vagaries of familial love and bold in its scrutiny of the personal and societal politics of race, this" "is Caryl Phillips's most powerful novel yet.
"From the Hardcover edition."
Industry Reviews
"[Phillips is] an insightful and sympathetic chronicler of race, British identity, and the immigrant experience." --The Christian Science Monitor "[A] serious novel. . . . [Keith's father's] discourse of ideas and anecdotes is gritty, brilliant, remarkable." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Phillips displays his considerable writing skills. His ear for speech is acute; his eye for the cityscapes of both London and the north of England is good; his sense of the history of England in the 1960s is sure and, most significantly, he has a dramatist's talent for creating telling scenes and incidents." --Washington Times
"Throughout Phillips's fiction and nonfiction, he focuses on people who are caught in between places, desires, and circumstances of history. . . . [Here, ] he elegantly handles a complicated time scheme, shifting smoothly between Keith's present and memories of his past." --World Literature Review
"Phillips has written extensively . . . about the legacy of the slave trade and the immigrant experience. . . . The hero's dying father delivers an incandescent soliloquy." --The New Yorker
"Caryl Phillips is an alpha-class writer, both as a phrase-maker and as an observer of human nature." --Mail on Sunday (UK)
"Phillips's excellent reputation is well deserved. He explores grand themes by peering expertly through the net curtains of everyday life. Intelligent, gripping, understated and affecting, this is a brilliant account of how real life can get in the way of a family's dreams." --Birmingham Post (UK)
"Convincing....Impressive . . . The conclusion is expertly done; the sense of loss it conjures, lasting." --Daily Mail (UK)
"Richly reflective....[Offers] significant rewards." -The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
