Small Island

"Small Island" is an international bestseller. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best, The Whitbread Novel Award, The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has now been adapted for the screen as a coproduction of the BBC and Masterpiece/WGBH Boston.
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve. Told in these four voices, "Small Island "is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers---in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.

Born in 1956 to Jamaican parents, Andrea Levy is the author of three previous novels and has received a British Arts Council Writers Award in addition to the Orange Prize and Whitbread distinctions. She lives works in London.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' PrizeA "Publishers Weekly" Top 10 Novel of the YearWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve.
Told in these four voices, "Small Island" is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossing taken and passage lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers--in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize
"A perfectly crafted tale of crossed lives and oceans. Big themes--abandonment, survival, racial awareness, forgiveness--are not always weighty enough to chart a smooth course over constant shifts in voice, time, and place. Levy's outstanding talent is her ability to control these upheavals. From Kingston to London to Calcutta, Levy deftly directs her story with twin reins of violence and humor."--"San Francisco Chronicle" "Levy's greatest achievement in "Small Island" is to convey how English racism was all the more heartbreaking for its colonial victims because it involved the crushing of their ideals . . . "Small Island" is too thoughtful a novel to promise its characters a happy ending, but it is generous enough to offer them hope."--Fatema Ahmed, "The New York Times Book Review"
"A perfectly crafted tale of crossed lives and oceans. Big themes--abandonment, survival, racial awareness, forgiveness--are not always weighty enough to chart a smooth course over constant shifts in voice, time, and place. Levy's outstanding talent is her ability to control these upheavals. From Kingston to London to Calcutta, Levy deftly directs her story with twin reins of violence and humor."--"San Francisco Chronicle"
"In the shabby remnants of post-blitz London, three near-strangers find themselves in a single house. Queenie Bligh is a spirited Yorkshirewoman waiting for her husband to return from the war and taking in tenants to make ends meet. Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican RAF veteran, is struggling to establish himself in England, a country that he'd been taught was his motherland but which regards him as an interloper; his bride, Hortense, has just arrived in London and is bewildered that her education and class can't transcend the color of her skin. The narrative voice jumps between the characters, a technique that embeds familiar cultural observations in closely observed and surprising lives . . . Levy's writing deftly illuminates the complex and contradictory motives behind each character's behavior."--"The New Yorker"
"Levy tells a good story, and she tells it well--using narrative voices across time and space as she revisits the conventions of the historical novel and imagines the hopes and pains of the immigrant's saga anew. Levy's novel is no mere flight of fantasy, for it is rooted in the past and mired in the complicated stuff of empire. At the same time the memorable characters are radically unhinged from any sense of national fixity as their lives become intermeshed in strangely unexpected yet predictable ways . . . Prize-winning is an arbitrary sport, but the recognition bestowed upon Levy's work is a testament to her talents--her formidable craft and staying power in an otherwise faddish business."--Louise Bernard, "The Washington Post Book World"
"Don't be deceived by the modest size of Andrea Levy's "Small Island" when you see it on bookstore shelves . . . The truth is that it's a sizable epic spanning three hemispheres and several decades--a revealing and accomplished novel . . . Levy deftly and generously captures the moment when the arrival of immigrants from far-flung parts of the British] Empire was shockingly fresh to all involved."--"Seattle Times"
"This splendid, well-told novel follows four intertwined lives that collide in post-war London and culminate in the birth of multicultural England. Levy's novel wi