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Small Island | About the author | Extracts | Further reading | Past events |
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The book’s author, Andrea Levy, is a Londoner
whose parents came to Britain from Jamaica in the 1940s. Small
Island, published in 2004, was her fourth novel and her
breakthrough, an international bestseller that has won the Orange
Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Commonwealth
Writers’ Prize and the Orange of Oranges Prize.
Gilbert, a Jamaican volunteer in the RAF, has returned to Britain on the Empire Windrush, having realised there are no opportunities for him back home. After his wartime experiences, he has few illusions left about the wonders of the ‘Mother Country’. Hortense, his haughty school teacher wife, has followed Gilbert to Britain naively believing all she has been taught about the superiority of the British and her privileged place among them. Queenie, their Earls Court landlady, is a brash, big-hearted woman yearning for excitement who has found herself stuck in a run-down house with disapproving neighbours. Bernard, Queenie’s racist and outwardly dull husband, is movingly shown to have his own share of hopes and disappointments. The story switches between the four voices and between 1948 and ‘before’ – as well as across three continents – to reveal how each person has reached this particular point in their lives. The ‘small island’ of the title refers to Jamaica, once considered the ‘big island’ of the Caribbean but now seen as an insignificant place by those who have returned from the war. It also refers to Britain reluctantly waking up to the fact it no longer rules the world, the borders of its once global empire shrinking around it, as well as to the individual characters who are isolated from each other by their failure to communicate. Reviews of Small Island 'A work of great imaginative power which ranks
alongside Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, George Lamming's
The Emigrants, and Caryl Phillips' The Final Passage
in dealing with the experience of migration. I hope that this novel
will get the critical attention it deserves' ‘Small Island is a great read, delivering
the sort of pleasure which has been the stock-in-trade of a long
line of English novelists. It’s honest, skilful, thoughtful and
important. This is Andrea Levy’s big book.’ ‘What makes Levy’s writing so appealing is
her even-handedness. All her characters can be weak, hopeless,
brave, good, bad – whatever their colour. The writing is rigorous
and the bittersweet ending, with its unexpected twist,
touching…People can retain dignity, however small their island.’ ‘Small Island is an astonishing tour de
force by Andrea Levy. Juggling four voices, she illuminates a little
known aspect of recent British history with wit and wisdom. A
compassionate account of the problems of post war immigration, it
cannot fail to have a strong modern resonance.’
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