From the acclaimed author of Cambridge (1991) comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips (http://www.carylphillips.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryl_Phillips) follows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries. Phillips’s characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man’s justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a ‘many-tongued chorus’ of common memory—and a stunning work of fiction addressing the lives of black people severed from their homeland.
256 pages in Vintage paperback edition.
ISBN 978-0099498261
