Shakespeare called Othello "an extravagant and wheeling strangers/Of here and every where."  In this exciting anthology, Caryl Phillips has collected writings by thirty-nine extravagant strangers: British writers who were born outside of Britain and see it with clear and critical eyes.  These eloquent and incisive voices prove that English literature, far from being pure or homogenous, has in fact been shaped and influenced by outsiders for over two hundred years.Here are slave writers, such as Ignatius Sancho, an eighteenth-century African who became a friend to Samuel Jonson and Laurence Sterne; writers born in the colonies, such as Thackeray, Kipling, and Orwell; "subject writers," such as C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul, foreign émigrés, such as Joseph Conrad and Kazuo Ishiguro; and postcolonial observers of the British scene, such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and Anita Desai.  With this eloquent and often inspiring collection, Phillips proves,...

Caryl 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's most enigmatic lost boys, as he deftly conjures young Heathcliff, the anti-hero of Wuthering Heights, and his ragged existence before Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to his family. Written in the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, The Lost Child is a multifaceted, deeply original response to Emily Bronte's masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. A critically acclaimed and sublimely talented storyteller, Caryl Phillips is "in a league with Toni Morrison and V. S. Naipaul"...

A Booker shortlisted novel by one of the finest writers of his generationA voice speaking out of a distant past, describes the consequences of his desperation: his daughter and two sons are condemned to the hold of an English slave ship bound for America in 1753. Here are the stories of these children: Nash, Martha, and Travis. Yet as the narrative unfolds, we come to understand that although they are his children, they are also all of slavery's children. Nash, returning to Africa in the 1830's a Christian-educated adult, a missionary to the new territory of Liberia, slowly becoming a part of the world his 'masters' intended him to convert...Martha, her own daughter and husband sold away from her, settling in the American wild west of the late nineteenth century, freeing herself from slavery but never from the weight of "such misery in one life"...Travis, an American GI stationed in a small Yorkshire village during the Second World War, finding an acceptance in England that...

Francis Barber, 'given' to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, afforded an unusual depth of freedom, which, after Johnson's death, would help hasten his wretched demise....Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and who ended his life in debt and despair...David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life and death would question the reality of English justice, and serve as a wake-up call for the entire nation.Each of these men's stories is told in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the tragedy of their lives. And each explores the themes at the heart of Caryl Phillips' work - belonging, identity, and race.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A novel about personal crisis and momentous social conflict, Caryl Phillips sixth novel tells the inextricably linked stories of a young Jewish woman growing up in mid-twentieth-century Germany, and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth-century Venice. At the heart of these stories is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with similarity and difference, with blood. This is a novel about how we define ourselves and consequently, it is about the most dangerous and nightmarish aspects of our identity.

Social worker Keith, separated from his wife and their teenage son, is floundering in a world of fraught sexual politics, parental responsibilities and class expectations. He takes refuge from his domestic problems in a long-cherished writing project and a renewed relationship with his aging father, who came to Britain as part of the windrush generation, but for the first time in his life he begins to feel extremely vulnerable as a black man in English society.Meanwhile Annabelle watches the man she married against the wishes of her parents struggle with his grip on reality. Despite their three year estrangement, she realises that they have no choice but to close ranks if they are to protect their son from a world of street gangs and violence.

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 Cambridge, 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.