Small Island
Books | Fiction / Literary
4.1
Andrea Levy
“Levy’s beautifully wrought novel is a window into 1948 England . . . A bristling, funny, angry tale of love and sacrifice.” —Entertainment Weekly The Basis for the PBS Masterpiece ClassicWinner of the Orange Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year 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. “Andrea Levy gives us a new, urgent take on our past.” —Vogue “A perfectly crafted tale of crossed lives and oceans . . . Happily, the hype is warranted—Small Island is a triumph.” —San Francisco Chronicle “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.” —The Washington Post
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More Details:
Author
Andrea Levy
Pages
448
Publisher
Macmillan + ORM
Published Date
2010-04-01
ISBN
1429901071 9781429901079
Ratings
Google: 4
Community ReviewsSee all
"War often engineers major societal change: families are uprooted, young people unexpectedly become leaders and are opened to new experiences, social groups mix. It's no coincidence that the U.S. social justice movements experienced renewed energy after World Wars I and II. In Britain, it was the anti-colonial movements which caught fire in the wake of war. The conflict is elegantly articulated by two characters in Andrea Levy's _Small Island_: a Jamaican, bitter that his RAF service earns him no respect or appreciation in post-war England, and a white Englishman who fought "so that each man could live amongst his own kind".<br/><br/>Told in the alternating voices of its central characters, Small Island examines the inner lives and struggles of Jamaican immigrants Hortense and Gilbert, both before and after the war. Gifted, well educated, and self-reliant, they are determined to find success in their revered "Mother country", but keenly disappointed by the ignorance and racism they encounter. Their English landlady Queenie has been similarly discouraged by life, particularly in her marriage to stolid, unimaginative Bernard, whose unshakable faith in British superiority and tradition will leave him pitifully unprepared to cope with post-war reality. There are no villains or heroes here, just 4 bewildered, ordinary people doing the best they can.<br/>"
Lesley Williams
"This was an interesting and heartbreaking novel about Jamaican soldiers who served on behalf of the British Empire during World War II, and the racism they faced both as a "different sort of Black" from American GIs and in England after the war.<br/><br/>The character voices were all unique and it was interesting to see the same situations from their different points of view. I docked a star because it started getting kind of melodramatic and silly near the end."
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