Small Island: Winner of the 'best of the best' Orange Prize

It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. Queenie Bligh?s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but Queenie doesn?t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It?s desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Gilbert?s wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.

'A brilliantly deft and humane account of two ordinary couples in post-war London' Evening Standard, Every scene is rich in implication, entrancing and disturbing at the same time; the literary equivalent of a switch-back ride, 'Small Island is never less than finely-written, delicately and often comically observed, and impressively rich in detail and little nuggets of stories' Evening Standard, 2 February 2004, 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 great dignity, however small their island, 'Small Island is as full of warmth and jokes and humanity as you could wish...Such a rich saga, stuffed full of interlocking narratives' Time Out, 2 February 2004

After she passed away on the 14th of February 2019, the Bookseller wrote: 'Andrea Levy will be remembered as a novelist who broke out of the confines assigned to her by prejudice to become a both a forerunner of Black British excellence and a great novelist by any standards.' Born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948, Andrea Levy wrote the novels that she had always wanted to read as a young woman, engaging books that reflect the experiences of black Britons and at the intimacies that bind British history with that of the Caribbean. She was described by BBC News as 'a writer who tackled important social issues . . . her writing . . . witty, humane and often moving, and full of richly drawn characters'.She was the author of six books, including SMALL ISLAND, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread book of the Year, and was adapted for TV and for the stage, by the National Theatre. It was selected by the BBC as one of its '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'. Her most recent novel, THE LONG SONG, won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was adapted for TV by the BBC.