Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Summary
London, 1948, and four narrators take turns. Hortense has sailed from Jamaica with her teaching certificates, her gloves and her exact BBC diction, to join Gilbert, the almost stranger she married as a ticket out; she rings the bell of the house in Earls Court expecting England, and gets one damp room. Gilbert served in the RAF during the war and came back on the Empire Windrush to the Mother Country he fought for, which now declines to rent to him, employ him at his level or sit beside him on the bus. The house belongs to Queenie, an English farmer's daughter who takes in coloured lodgers, as the street calls them, partly for the rent and partly because her heart is bigger than her situation. And her husband Bernard, missing since the war, is on his way home with the Empire's prejudices intact.
Levy braids the four voices across two timelines, Before and 1948, so that every collision in the house has its history: Queenie's wartime affair with Michael Roberts, a Jamaican airman, arrives in the last act as a baby, and the choice made about that child, handed between the two couples in the book's devastating final pages, contains the whole novel.
It is generous, funny and angry in careful proportions, with Hortense's grand, wounded voice the best thing in it.
Around four hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the Windrush generation's arrival told from both sides of the front door, as comedy and injury at once.
Historical Context & Significance
Small Island swept 2004, winning the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and it has kept accumulating standing since: the BBC placed it among the hundred most influential novels in 2019, and it was chosen for the Big Jubilee Read in 2022.
Andrea Levy was writing her own prehistory. Born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents, her father a passenger on the Empire Windrush itself in 1948, she spent three earlier novels on the second generation before turning to the crossing itself. The Long Song, her novel of Jamaican slavery's last years, followed in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Booker. She died of cancer in 2019, at sixty two, by which point the Windrush scandal had made her subject front page news and her books required reading.
The BBC filmed Small Island in 2009, and Helen Edmundson's stage version opened at the National Theatre in 2019 to full houses, the rare adaptation that became a national event in its own right.