A strikingly clever and funny book, filled with a passion for ideas and language.

"Centers on Abel and Vera Paisley, a working-class Jamaican couple striving to build a better life for their children. Abel travels to London in the early 1960s in search of fortune. Instead, he sees an opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life by faking his death and assuming a new identity. Vera, now a widow, is racked with guilt over her husband's "death" and takes out her grief on her children, Irene and Vincent. The effects of Abel's decision...

"Dominoes opens in London, twenty-nine days before the wedding of a young couple. Layla is a mixed-race woman--with a Black, Jamaican mother, and a white father she's never met--and Andy is a white man of Scottish descent. When they first meet at a party, they can't believe how instant their chemistry is, and how quickly their relationship unfolds. But the commonalities between the two outweigh their differences; funnily enough, they even share a...

"Set in a West Country farming village, The House of Broken Bricks lays bare the complexities of day-to-day life for a mixed-race family. Jess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in a city where she easily blends in into a creaking house on a floodplain where predatory birds hover over fields, eels coil in the river mud, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider and no one looks like...

A Jamaican prostitute in London undergoes a transformation after reading a pamphlet by a Jamaican church group. She gives up sin and becomes a fanatic of the pure life, only to discover on her return to Jamaica that the church is run by a drug dealer. By the author of After Rain.