"A New World Order" ranges widely across the Atlantic World that Caryl Phillips has charted in his award winning novels and non-fiction. He argues that there is a new world order of cultural plurality, one which is being promoted by the increasingly central role of the migrant and the refugee in the modern world. He goes on to reflect on the work of such seminal figures as Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, Steven Spielberg, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Marvin Gaye. Phillips writes about the moment when St. Kitts, the island of his birth, became independent and talks about the responsibility of being a writer born into a postcolonial world who lives on both sides of the Atlantic. He turns the spotlight on Britain, speculating about his parents migration in the late fifties, the continued legacy of racism, his own helpless loyalty to Leeds United, and his anxieties at feeling as though he is both of, and not of, Britain.

A New World Order : Selected Essays

Literature & Fiction

CARYL PHILLIPS

Classics

Vintage

<p>Dorothy has taken early retirement and walked away from a bad marriage, an affair gone sour and a dangerous obsession. She moves to a small English village where she soon learns that England itself is changing beyond measure as the world outside its borders encroaches and intrudes. The English village is a place where people come to lick their wounds. Between her visits to the doctor and the music lessons she gives to bored teenagers, she is trying to rebuild a life. It's not immediately clear why her neighbour, Solomon, is living in the village, but his African origin suggests a complex history that is at odds with his dull routine of washing the car and making short trips to the supermarket. Though all he has in common with the English is a shared language, it soon becomes clear that Solomon hopes that his new country will provide him with a safe haven. Gradually they establish a form of comfort in each other's presence that alleviates the isolation they both feel.</p>

A Distant Shore

Contemporary

Vintage Books USA

Caryl Phillips's first novel tells the story of Leila, a nineteen-year-old woman living on a small Caribbean island in the 1950s. Unsatisfied with life on the island, Leila decides to leave her friends and follow her mother overseas, taking her restless husband Michael and her young son with her. Her subsequent passage to England brings her face to face with the consequences of the decisions she has made to determine her life on her own terms.

Final Passage

Foreigners: Three English Lives

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.

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

In Higher Ground, Caryl Phillips presents three characters separated by time and distance but united by the profound sympathy he has for their humanity. In the first story, a young West African is oppressed by the shadow of slavery; in the second an African-American fights to survive solitary confinement without sacrificing his integrity; in the third a Polish refugee struggles to ward off the increasing isolation of a life in exile.

Higher Ground

Vintage Books

Caryl Phillips' ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War. Crossing the River won the James Tait Black Memorial Award in 1994, and was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize.

Crossing the River

Cambridge

Dramatic and challenging novel about freedom and prejudice by one of the most important authors of his generation

Nature of Blood

Covering three ages, this novel begins in the Caribbean with the slave trade at its height, and moves into the 1960s with a series of letters from a black American convict to his family. The final part, set in England, tells of a West Indian who is determined to leave for his native land.

Picador

Bertram Francis, a British West Indian, has spent the last 20 years away from the Carribean. Now independence is looming and he is going back to see the end of colonial rule. But the visit is not the nostalgic homecoming he expected as he finds himself an outsider in a place he thought was home.

A State of Independence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by CARYL PHILLIPS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by CARYL PHILLIPS

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by CARYL PHILLIPS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A New World Order : Selected Essays

A Distant Shore

Final Passage

Foreigners: Three English Lives

Higher Ground

Crossing the River

Cambridge

Nature of Blood

Higher Ground

A State of Independence