Books by Caryl Phillips

Three plays by playwright and novelist Caryl Phillips, written in the 1980s and collected here for the first time: Strange Fruit, Where There is Darkness, and The Shelter.

Presents the stories of Francis Barber, 'given' to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson; Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer; and, David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice.

Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves.

A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood.

Phillips explores three cities of slavery. Liverpool, constructed on the slave trade, now denying its past; the Ghanaian city of Elmina, site of the important slave embarkation fort in Africa; and Charleston, known as the entry point to America where one-third of black slaves were bought and sold.

'The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' This is how W.C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans. Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family.

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.

The English village is a place where people come to lick their wounds. 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.