Small Island

“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 Classic
Winner 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